Cover Story

The Valley of Abandoned Gods

Images by Ashish Sharma and Words by Rahul Pandita

The Junior Union Home Minister Kishan Reddy said the Government would restore and reopen thousands of vandalised temples in Jammu and Kashmir. Will there be a revival of the Hindu heritage in the Valley soon?

Narendra Modi: The Global Campaigner

Sudeep Paul

The gains and challenges of Modi’s foreign policy

Oh, the Cursed Fruit

Lhendup G Bhutia

Our correspondent’s experiment with the Gandhian menu

Student Supplicant Politician Statesman

Roderick Matthews

London played both active and passive roles in Gandhi’s life. It was where he became a man and a lawyer, and where he first played high-stakes politics. British law shaped him; the orderly part of his system was based squarely on the idea of staying within the law, and expecting your opponents to do the same

The Dharmic State

Bibek Debroy

The excesses of state intervention in India have been justified in the name of Gandhi. That’s because he has often been reduced to a face on a currency note, or a remembrance fetish twice a year

From Margin to Centre

Nonica Datta

Jawaharlal Nehru hailed the Amritsar Congress as the first ‘Gandhi Congress’. It was in 1919 that the young Jawaharlal became Gandhi’s lieutenant and organised relief work in the Punjab. Thus began one of the most critical and longest political partnerships of modern India

To Pen the Swadeshi Narrative

Nikita Doval

Ratnam pens and Sulekha ink were started in response to Gandhi’s call for self-reliance in the 1930s. But how have the instruments that helped write history fared themselves?

Sex and the Saint

Madhavankutty Pillai

In every domain of life, he was a player of infinite games and, therefore, his worldview becomes, in some ways, quite inaccessible to us. We have to remember that one of the litmus tests of Gandhi, and he’s absolutely firm about it, is that you never do anything to someone else that you do not first do to yourself. You never make a demand of someone else that you do not first make of yourself

Guru Darshan

Ullekh NP

The 1925 dialogue between Mahatma Gandhi and Sree Narayana Guru was a pleasant precursor to the acrimonious Gandhi-Ambedkar debate of the 1930s

A Small Still Voice

Tridip Suhrud

It is the capacity to hear the inner voice that for Gandhi reveals the distance he has traversed in his quest. Each invocation of the inner voice indicated to him his submission to God. This listening required proximity with oneself. This proximity could be attained through the practice of ahimsa