The Indian experiment in democracy has not failed. It has spawned a tenacious citizenry that is staging the most spirited fight to preserve its rights and dignity. What lets it down is India's muddled opposition.
My essay in the @NewYorker
https://t.co/SygCGfPEhD
"@NarendraModi's move to evict the Delhi Gymkhana Club from the administrative heart of India's capital corrects an aberration. Nobody should mourn its end"
Me in today's @Telegraph
https://t.co/MPhyiVwKZO
If the dinosaurs in the Indian press had channeled into their work a fraction of the fury which they are now directing at a young Norwegian reporter who had the gall to perform her duty, India might not be the dive it is today. Defending Modi isn’t your job. Interrogating him is.
Every tragedy for ordinary Indians is an opportunity for Modi to stage a self-glorifying stunt. The truth is that the prime minister, living in unimaginable comfort, will not experience even a trillionth of the misery his monumental incompetence has unleashed on India.
#WATCH | Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reduced his convoy size significantly. Reduction in vehicles was done while maintaining essential security components as per SPG protocol.
He had twelve years to lift India. He squandered that time lying to Indians, destroying institutions, erecting a personality cult, enriching his cronies, and deploying hate to divide and subdivide Indians. May today’s defeat be the beginning of his swift political end.
Today is a historic day- the united Opposition resoundingly defeated the illegal & ill-thought out Constitutional Amendment Bill brought in the guise of a Women’s Reservation Bill.
“Hungary under [Viktor] Orbán has become a haven for conservative ideologues from the United States who share its preoccupations with national identity, demographic homogeneity, and cultural conformity,” Kapil Komireddi writes. Here’s what his recent defeat could signal. https://t.co/p6LENLva0x
The founders of India delivered the largest expansion of democratic suffrage in history. The father of "New India" is presiding over history's biggest exercise in disenfranchisement.
This is a monumental day for Hungary, and it gives hope to people in strongman-led democracies elsewhere. Peter Magyar is a politician with many flaws, but he mobilised voters with a message of hope. Orban, by contrast, simply tried to scare them.
Viktor Orban built the model that Modi and Trump are mimicking. He reconfigured Hungarian democracy in ways that make his removal extremely difficult. On Sunday, his sixteen-year rule may come to an end.
My dispatch from Budapest for the @NewYorker
https://t.co/PkwwyAI3Kj
Viktor Orban built the model that Modi and Trump are mimicking. He reconfigured Hungarian democracy in ways that make his removal extremely difficult. On Sunday, his sixteen-year rule may come to an end.
My dispatch from Budapest for the @NewYorker
https://t.co/PkwwyAI3Kj
@TheChaiDude As I said, India should have acknowledged and condemned the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. It should now condemn the gratuitous destruction of Iran. I see no contradiction. To uphold principle is not to grandstand. It is to affirm our commitment to a rules-based world.
“For all its preening proclamations of its own rise and importance on the world stage, Modi’s ‘New India’ proved too inconsequential to influence the warmakers—and too weak, craven, and self-woundingly stupid to be spared the war’s effects”
Me in @UnHerd
https://t.co/fyH1vwxEc2
“Serbia is viewed with suspicion for not joining the sanctions against Russia. Yet one of the lesser known facts about the Ukraine war is that a third of all armaments received by Kyiv at one point originated in Serbia”
Me in @Telegraph
https://t.co/5bXPSvMEdJ
A calamity is about to wash over India. Please be aware that the prime minister will do nothing to help you. He has already disappeared. His cronies will emerge from this even richer. The weakest in our society will be blamed. Be wise. At the next election, vote with your head.
Throwing people in jail for criticising you, taking down tweets, silencing social media, coercing the press, weaponising the taxman against rivals, terrorising minorities, dodging reporters, destroying lives, disappearing during crises. Hallmarks of a leader of courage.
Modi’s failure to condemn the war on Iran is not detached statecraft. It is the product of personal cowardice. Modi fears Trump. And because India is governed by a cult, the regime’s priority is to protect the cult’s master at the expense of India’s reputation and principles.