Shashi Tharoor

Social-media platforms are often criticised for their susceptibility to toxic dialogue and vicious attacks. It is a problem that India knows well. Just ask External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, whose recent vilification by members and supporters of her own ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a case in point.

Comparisons are generally invidious, especially when they involve political leaders from different countries.

In India's Karnataka state, the governor is favouring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form a government, despite an opposition coalition having won more seats in the state legislature.

India has no coltan or rare earths, little oil, and not enough water. What it does have is people—1.3 billion and counting. That makes

"History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn't have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.

Last month, a devastating cyclone swept the southern tip of India, causing immense damage to parts of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Lakshadweep.

Culture and history have become new battlegrounds in India. Debates over the Taj Mahal's position as a symbol of multicultural India have yet to be settled, yet the nation is already being torn apart further by another cultural controversy—this time, over a film.

In a country where politics has turned toxic, leading virtually everything—from festival firecrackers to animal husbandry—to take on a “communal” religious colouring, perhaps it should not be surprising that even one of the world's most famous monuments has become a target. But that doesn't make it any less tragic—or destructive.

When I left India for graduate school in the United States in 1975, the word “globalisation” was not in use anywhere in the world.

Late last month, when two Indian states and the national capital were held to ransom by rioting mobs protesting their spiritual leader's conviction on two counts of raping minor girls, many Indians found themselves confronting several painful truths about their country.

Seventy years ago this month, at midnight on August 15, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed India's independence from the British Empire. Nehru called it “a moment that comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” With that, the country embarked on a remarkable experiment in governance that continues to this day.

On July 1, an eerie silence descended over many of India's teeming marketplaces. At midnight, a new national goods and services tax (GST)...

By accusing India of demanding “billions and billions and billions of dollars” as a condition for its participation in the Paris climate

Printed newspapers offer the added advantage of reliability, in a country [India] where internet access cannot be guaranteed all the time, owing to still-patchy electricity supplies, which cause frequent blackouts even in the capital.

Relations between India and China haven't been particularly warm in recent months.

India's parliamentary system, inherited from the British, is rife with ineffiencies. By the logic of Westminster, you elect a legislature to form the executive, and when the executive does not command a secure majority in the legislative assembly, the government falls, triggering fresh elections.

Indians tend not to dwell on the country's colonial past. Whether through national strength or civilisational weakness, India has long refused to hold any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder, and exploitation. But Indians' equanimity about the past does not annul what was done.

On November 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that, at the stroke of midnight, some 14 trillion rupees worth of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes – 86 percent of all the currency in circulation – would no longer be legal tender. With that, India's economy was plunged into chaos.

One major casualty of Donald Trump's victory in the bruising US presidential election is, without a doubt, America's soft power around the world. It is a development that will be difficult – perhaps even impossible – to reverse, especially for Trump.

Last month, 18 people in the Gopalganj district of India's Bihar state died after consuming illicit alcohol, highlighting – once again – the peculiar relationship between morality and tragedy in India.