It has always been relatively easy for Indian governments from both the political left and right to keep Kashmir from the eyes of the world. At no time has this been more obvious than now. Landlocked, under the guns of half a million Indian troops and paramilitaries, cut off sporadically from all modern communications and … Read more
Harsh Mander had barely arrived in the remote northeastern Indian state of Assam when he was drawn into a humanitarian horror story years in the making. It was about to get exponentially worse. “The people of Assam are sitting atop a smoldering volcano, one that threatens to erupt into catastrophic suffering and injustice,” he wrote … Read more
Before this year ends, the United Nations will have committed itself and its 193 member governments to a new 15-year development strategy to be hailed as a blueprint for ending poverty, expanding social justice and strengthening equality. Equality for whom is the question. Missing by deliberate design from the new plan, called the Sustainable Development … Read more
Not every prime minister, speaking for the first time at the United Nations General Assembly, gets to top that off with a sold-out rally in Madison Square Garden in New York. Narendra Modi, a relatively new face in Indian national politics who became prime minister in May, seems poised to make the most of his … Read more
India opened the polls on April 7 for another of its uniquely epic elections. In nine stages of staggered voting that stretch into mid-May, allowing election officials, observers and law enforcement teams to move from place to place, 814 million voters are registered to cast ballots across a country one-third the size of the United … Read more
A committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union met in mid-January, as a busy year of elections globally was beginning, to confront the human-rights violations and sometimes lethal abuse suffered by 262 members of national legislatures in countries that often call themselves democracies. From Jan. 13 to 17, the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s committee on the human rights … Read more
