The 'Maha Kumbh' was crafted to secure the consent, not only of the traditional pilgrims, but also that of the well-heeled 'holy-dippers', who flew in and out, and waxed eloquent about the wonderful 'management' of their elegant enclaves.

A main theme of Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature is the speed at which things happened, the paralysing swiftness with which the apparatus of fascism in Nazi Germany was put together in barely a few weeks.

There are certain domains of intellectual activity where the necessary reading strategy is a kind of doggedly pedestrian literalism. Faiz's poetry is not in these domains.

Words are used to arrest the wayward and playful rhythms of natural language, and chain-ganged into parade ground drills.

By camouflaging the upper caste, upper class interests it represents in the colours of the ‘nation’, the BJP strategy is to paint all parties not aligned with it as ‘anti-national’, thereby ending the very possibility of politics.

Assiduously cultivated hostilities can now be deployed tactically and politically, in the pursuit of hard, material ends.

If all the suspects are declared innocent, the responsibility for whatever happens must lie with the victims, for victims are the only certainties in any case.

Rather than treating Kashmiris as part of the problem, India must involve them in the process of resolving the Kashmir issue.

The simple point of this strategy is that aggressively administered stupidity is stupefying. It is too much of a struggle keeping the daily battering at bay – “nationalism”; “beef”; sedition charges, slogans, and two bodies dangling from a tree in Jharkhand.

Shaktiman, the mare whose leg was amputated after an assault by political activists, is a symbol of our broken republic – a permanent and searing reminder of the dark forces that now threaten to consume us and our possible futures.