But using brute force to re-establish the physical control that might have existed in a distant past, and, while doing so, to obliterate the difference between military and civilian targets, and even between the healthy and the hospitalized, and between adults and babies, is not something the world or the people of Russia will forget.

Nationhood does not demand homogeneity or uniformity. Nor does it require authoritarian or imperial rule by a big neighbour. These too are messages that Ukraine's horrific drama is sending.

We must not allow ourselves to be fooled. What is advancing before our eyes is not equality but a project of erasure...

Signs suggest that splitting the Indian population from one another, and pointing to one segment as the source of all problems, is a policy now facing the law of diminishing appeal.

When future historians write of majority victimhood, India will be example number one...Mercifully, both India and Hinduism are much greater, and better represented by the silent millions who only occasionally speak up. By people, for example, like the women in that Karnataka village.

Rajmohan Gandhi gave Keynote Remarks at the IofC Japan Conference, Oct. 23-24, 2021

When not only partition but also carnage accompanied India’s independence in 1947, Winston Churchill, who had never concealed his dislike of the freedom movement, claimed that anarchy would be free India’s fate. “The future,” he prophesied in September 1947, “will witness a vast abridgment of India’s population.”

Will Modi overcome his defeat at the hands of the farmers by staging spectacular shows like the one he just put up at Varanasi? His showmanship is not in doubt, and his skills with costume, make-up, scenery, lights, sound and camera are of a high order. Moreover, what he is marketing through his shows can seem extremely attractive.

Race, guns and Covid - the last in its Omicron incarnation - remain live issues in the US.

Majoritarians and authoritarians, whether native or foreign, may have to reckon with the inner Hind Swaraj of the "ordinary" Indian - in the home, the street, the polling booth, the classroom, the courtroom, wherever.