News Archive

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is suffering from success. After winning the assembly elections, back in May, she has now rechristened herself as ‘King George V’ and is holding Durbar’s across the country to further assert herself.

I first came across the Sannyasi rebellion not in the books of history (thank you ridiculous education system) but in a scary tome of literature that I would never have voluntarily opened on my own. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 novel, “Anandamath” (Abbey of Bliss) is a 336 page long tribute to these heroes of the Indian independence movement that the rest of the country seems to have forgotten. The novel is otherwise famous for publishing our national song, “Vande Mataram” and sparking the first kindles of nationalism in a heavily subjugated population. Vehemently banned by the Briti...

Recently, a scholar of Aligarh Muslim University, Danish Rahim, has alleged that he has been denied PhD degree for praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While the university has later denied the claims, it must be mentioned that AMU has a history of being in the headlines for controversial reasons.

The Central Board of Secondary Education has said that it will take strict action against responsible persons after a question asked in the class 12 exams triggered outrage. The question in Term 1 exam for the first class 12 exams under board exams 2022 had asked to name the political party under whose regime the Gujarat riots in 2002 took place.

In 2017, India’s national song Vande Mataram was mired in debate once again. Following the Madras High Court’s order to make Vande Mataram compulsory in schools and government and private offices, a loathsome politics was triggered over the national song in Maharashtra.

As India’s freedom struggle was approaching its culmination, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made his intentions clear that Indian National Congress (INC) should be dissolved. He felt the objective of the INC was to liberate India from British rule; once that goal was accomplished, the organization had no existential purpose. Gandhi proposed that all leaders who desired public service via electoral politics should form their own political party and contest elections. This actually would have been democracy in the real sense.

A Parliamentary committee on education has called for a review of how Indian freedom fighters are depicted in school history textbooks and recommended that “ancient wisdom and knowledge” from the Vedas be incorporated into the school curriculum, stating that educational content for students should be “free of biases.”

For the past few weeks, conscientious locals and residents have been resolutely protesting against the public offering of namaz by Muslims. The opposition to namaz at public places reached a crescendo this week as the demonstrators organised a protest to rail against the Gurugram administration for allowing Muslims to continue using public places for their religious activities. 

Repetition, it is said, is the most important ingredient of propaganda. Hitler once said, “All propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas. Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd”. Hitler essentially advocated that the propaganda message must be simple with only a few ingredients and it should be repeated ad-nauseam so the masses effortlessly remember the message.