Shashi Tharoor

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.

Indian politics continues to amaze and appal. The surge in cow vigilantism — a uniquely Indian phenomenon that has lately begun to flourish under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government — is no exception.

Go to see a movie in India nowadays, and despite the elaborate musical numbers and extravagant sets, you may well find the content pretty bland. The reason is simple: the industry is reeling under severe censorship. This flies in the face of India's democratic tradition – and it needs to stop.

New Delhi – In late April, a 17-year-old girl named Kriti Tripathi leaped to her death in Kota, India, shortly after passing the country's examination for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).

Prime Minister David Cameron declared outright that the Kohinoor would have to “stay put,” because “if you say yes to one, you would suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.” With Kumar having essentially taken Britain's side on the Kohinoor issue, albeit for different reasons, nationalists like me are losing hope that we will get that priceless element of our heritage back.

Sixty-six years after adopting one of the world's most liberal constitutions, India is being convulsed by a searing debate over...

A number of seemingly unrelated controversies in India actually have one important element in common: They all relate to criminal

Vemula was admitted to his university on merit, not through the reservation system. Yet he faced all the prejudice that would be directed at any Dalit. He left behind a passionate letter outlining his mistreatment at the hands of an insensitive and bureaucratic university administration.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surprise visit to Lahore, Pakistan, on Christmas Day brought his hyperkinetic year of global diplomacy to a headline-grabbing close.