Wordsmiths
Showing all 11 books
Further historians may well conclude that the Taliban victory did more to change the world than the violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The Taliban have come to power in one of Asia’s most strategically located countries with one single-minded aim: to redeem the entire Islamic world of one billion people. Two million people – one tenth of this country’s pre-war population – have been killed during the past 18 years. Another 1.5 million are ...
The subalternized masses find in the Buddha and his teachings a haven from their socio-cultural degradation and economic-political deprivation. For them, Buddhism comes as a vehicle to emerge into a new and modern religio-cultural, and eventually socio-political, reality. More than half a century before Bhim Rao Ambedkar’s historic conversion, there were attempts across the subcontinent to resuscitate the core philosophical and social ideas of the Buddha as a ...
In Naxalbari where it originated, the militant agrarian movement seems to have faded away. But in Central Bihar it has been alive and gathering strength for over three decades since 1968, defying state repression and recurrent episodes of massacres by the feudal elements. This is the region in the eye of the storm, with mushrooming caste-based private armies of upper-caste landlords to counter the upsurge. It is also the arena where the various militant groups ...
Millenarian change brings about a time warp, and scum from the past resurfaces. As the second millennium rang to a close, every literature began ‘pastizing’ grand theories. We heard of end of history, end of modernity, end of author, end of geography. A bizarre endless end seemed to have engulfed the world of academics. Francis Fukuyama theorized that totalitarianism was dying, that democracy was the future. Felipe ...
The result is a painstaking, thoroughly researched writing on the unsavoury happenings in Afghanistan and their grave implications for the neighbourhood, and India in particular. Without aiming to take sides in the protracted civil war in Afghanistan, the book analyses what may lie in store for Afghanistan and the region. The envisaged five future scenarios are: (a) Taliban rule; (b) Taliban defeat; (c) arms embargo with the objective of imposing a broad-based ...
With this type of jihad the kufar are repelled and their hearts are filled with fear. The purpose is to ensure the kufar remain terrorized and away from mischief, thereby allowing the message of Islam to be conveyed without obstruction. Islam has ordered the Muslims to gain strength to the extent that the disbelievers are terrorized. Everyone who is steadfast to his religion, everyone who holds on to his religion, everyone who defends his religion became a ...
Some notable features of the quick-sands called Pakistan are: inability, even after half a century of its existence, to come to a clear conclusion about its own identity; open contempt for institutions of governance by the armed forces; intimidation of the judiciary; economic collapse; survival of the state on drug money; export of terrorism across the borders; grim ethnic divide; public disdain for state authority; lack of leadership, vision and strategy. ...
In more than one-fifth of Indian territory, the writ of the left-wing extremists holds sway. Many jungle areas in Madhya Pradesh are out of bounds for junior forest officers. When the Howrah-New Delhi Rajdhani Express derailed in Rathigarh in September 2002, the Bihar police avoided traveling through Naxalite-infested tract, consequently delaying action. At many places, the police and the revenue system have been rendered redundant. 'Jan adalatas' held in ...
Instructing the Pandavas on his deathbed, the patriarch of the Mahabharata, Bhishma, told them that a basic tenet of statecraft is that for a kind 'No one is his friend, no one his enemy. Circumstances make enemies and friends' (Cover illustration). This axiom was formulated millennia before Lord Palmerston's oft-quoted one-that states do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies but only permanent interests-became conventional wisdom. ...