Vikas Pathak

Columns

How Hindutva lost its first battle for India after Partition

Hindutva had failed to attract Hindus at the moment that was the most ripe for its growth: Partition. And it would be useful to recall that the Congress trumped it in those troubled times with a combination of Gandhi’s universalist Hinduism and Nehru’s secularism.

Columns

Why the first-past-the-post system needs rethinking

The first-past-the-post system has led to a strange situation in the country at a time when many elections are seeing decisive verdicts. The votes of a large chunk of voters do not count at all in law-making.

Columns

AAP’s ideology-agnostic governance model isn’t the answer to Modi

In between the two core, ideological, voters of the BJP and the Congress lies a new kind of floating voter who chooses the BJP under Modi in the Lok Sabha without necessarily committing to the party in assembly polls.

Columns

Shaheen Bagh polarisation may fail in Delhi, but this isn’t enough

The AAP strategy of non-ideological delivery of services may not work for any opposition party in 2024. The BJP may possibly be able to turn the tide with a single national crisis, just like the Balakot airstrikes ended up decimating the opposition.

Columns

No, Mr. Modi, Nehru did not seek discrimination in citizenship

Nehru as Prime Minister had made an intervention on the question of citizenship in the Constituent Assembly on August 12, 1949, and had rejected the idea of differential treatment on the grounds of religion even at a time when the Partition riots were fresh.

Columns

Peaceful protesters uphold the constitution on Republic Day

This Republic Day, perhaps for the first time, became an occasion for not just an official parade but also multiple, creative, ways of celebrating it, including in opposition to the government of the day.

Columns

Shaheen Bagh women usher in India’s new secularism

This nascent new secularism has something organic about it. It isn’t the Congress model of the 1980s, where secularism meant state outreach to Muslims via the Muslim clergy.

Columns

Understanding the dangers of electoral bonds

The greatest danger of electoral bonds lies in the ruling party getting funded anonymously. For, there is always a chance that a corporate house funds the ruling party and, in return, a government formulates policy that benefits that corporate house. This can lead to crony capitalism hiding beneath a veil of opacity.

Columns

Tanhaji: The period film that attacked history

For filmmakers who think times are ripe to paint medieval India as a battlefield where Hindus were seeking to expel Muslims, the movie Tanhaji signifies the challenge, as it has to Islamise and paint as a beast Udaybhan Rajput, a Rajput commander of the Mughals.

Columns

JNU, a premier university fighting for survival

Twenty years back, JNU was seen as a marker of intellectual worth in the very city where it has been branded “anti-national” and parasitic in recent times.