politics

Editor’s Note: Demolition-Reclamation-Reinvention

S Prasannarajan

A temple in Modi’s India, if his words are any indication, cannot afford to be incompatible with the spirit of modernisation he has unleashed

Imagining the Idea of Indianness in Hindi cinema

Rachel Dwyer

The national scene

Indraprastha

Virendra Kapoor

A lucky economist, a chief justice's love for publicity and a chief minister's drunken words

Mark Tully, who reported it for the world from ground zero, watched some leaders asking the police to stay away and Sangh volunteers breaching police cordons with ease. Then they began to climb up the domes of the mosque and started hacking away at the mortar

Kameshwar Chaupal: The First Kar Sevak

Rahul Pandita

Kameshwar Chaupal, now 61, recounts the exact moment he was called onto the stage in Ayodhya with Sangh Parivar stalwarts and told that he would lay the first brick at the construction site of the proposed Rama temple

In the Name of Rama

Amita Shah

From behind the scenes as well as the frontline, they provided the intellectual, political and spiritual ballast to a movement that culminated on Demolition Day

LK Advani: Man of the Movement

Ullekh NP

LK Advani was the original apostle of hardcore Hindutva and the man who mobilised India for the sake of Rama

Dateline History

Siddharth Singh

The operative emotion here is one of longing—for better work, opportunities, some development, and, of course, for the grand temple. The contrast with intellectual India could not be more different