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Saturday October 05, 2024
Aijaz Zaka Syed
Aijaz Zaka Syed

The writer is a Middle East based columnist.

  • June 19, 2020

    Who’s afraid of Safoora Zargar?

    When the history of these extraordinary times is written, the BJP may go down as a ‘great leveller.’ It has succeeded in razing to the ground...

  • April 18, 2020

    Indian media and the war on Muslims

    The writer is an independent writer and former editor.Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages, said Spiro Agnew. I wonder what...

  • March 30, 2020

    A little germ cannot defeat us

    Amid this deepening darkness of all-round doom and gloom, there is a ray of hope at last. The raging global pandemic of the coronavirus has killed...

  • March 21, 2020

    Capitulation of the worst kind

    A Hindu friend of mine refers to India’s ruling party as the Bharat Jalao Party . Every time he says it, he says it with greater conviction....

  • February 22, 2020

    An Orwellian nightmare

    The sale of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, has reportedly surged 10,000 times since a New York property developer...

  • February 14, 2020

    Victory belongs to Shaheen Bagh

    So the aam aadmi’s ‘jharu’ has swept away the toxic garbage that the BJP had flooded the national capital of Delhi with.The credit for the...

  • February 07, 2020

    When the courts let you down

    Justice Markandey Katju is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India. Long before he retired in 2011, he had been known for both his outspoken...

  • January 24, 2020

    People power grounds Modi juggernaut

    Narendra Modi is in a league of his own. He swept back into power in May 2019, defying disasters like demonetisation, GST, unemployment and agrarian...

  • December 22, 2019

    For India: enough is enough

    I have never felt so proud of my country in a long, long time. Led mostly by students and the youth, Indians are marching in their millions across...

  • December 15, 2019

    Indian Muslims: the road ahead

    “Where do we go from here?” asked a US-based Indian Muslim friend the morning after India lurched further to the right with the smooth passage...

  • December 08, 2019

    No country for Muslims

    Can a leopard change its spots? Can the saffron clan led by the RSS and BJP ever give up its core philosophy and agenda that is founded on a...

  • November 23, 2019

    Road ahead from Ayodhya

    If the bizarre Ayodhya verdict of India’s Supreme Court is a classic case of adding insult to injury, on the one hand, it marks the final and...

  • November 15, 2019

    Hollywood, Bollywood and Islamophobia

    Thanks to my solitary existence, I end up spending hours watching television. I keep telling myself to do something useful and worthwhile like read...

  • November 08, 2019

    Are we all not refugees?

    Viet Thanh Nguyen is a young and upcoming American writer and author of the bestselling novel, ‘The Sympathizer’. He landed in the ‘land of...

  • October 26, 2019

    India in the age of Savarkar

    Whatever you may think of the BJP and its extended Parivar, they have a sordid sense of humour. At a time when India and the world are celebrating...

  • October 18, 2019

    How Congress helped Hindutva

    Indian Muslims fell out of love with the Congress Party, long before Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in his infinite wisdom decided to unlock the doors...

  • October 12, 2019

    Can Congress be saved?

    Salman Khurshid is a man of few words. On rare occasions when he speaks his mind, he weighs his words carefully like the seasoned and successful...

  • October 04, 2019

    Remembering Gandhi in Modi’s India

    Nothing is so prized in politics as a short public memory. As India and the world mark the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi, and world leaders ply...

  • September 28, 2019

    A broken system

    The Indian judiciary, once known for its independence and integrity, had been the last hope of the dispossessed. Where do they turn for justice if...

  • September 06, 2019

    Ghosts of Ayodhya

    The ghosts of Ayodhya just refuse to go away. They have been kept around, and busy, with great effort and ingenuity. The tragedy has remained as...

  • August 30, 2019

    The Indian media fails Kashmiris - again

    Recalling the stellar role of the Indian media during the infamous internal emergency imposed by the late Indira Gandhi, Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP...

  • August 24, 2019

    Kashmir: as the world watches India

    Kudos to Narendra Modi and his hefty henchman, Amit Shah. They have managed to transform India’s image overnight from that of being the world’s...

  • August 18, 2019

    Dismantling Nehru’s India

    Who would have thought that five decades after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, the architect of modern India would not only find himself in the dock and...

  • August 09, 2019

    Integrating Kashmir, at gunpoint

    No wonder the Kashmiris are so outraged and feel outright cheated. In the words of Shah Faesal, a young and bright Kashmiri who topped India’s...

  • August 02, 2019

    The bonds that connect us

    Last year, and at the beginning of this year, when I exchanged Christmas and New Year greetings on Facebook, some fellow travellers were upset....

  • July 26, 2019

    Can Congress survive sans the Gandhis?

    Without a Gandhi at the top, India’s Congress Party is increasingly looking and acting like a headless chicken. Since its debacle in the recent...

  • July 20, 2019

    Fighting for the American dream

    If Donald Trump’s shock election for the world’s most powerful office had been seen as an accident and as a recipe for disaster by many, he has...

  • July 13, 2019

    Ram and the mob

    How many Indians today would know that Allama Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, not just has a whole poem dedicated to Lord Ram, he also hails him...

  • July 05, 2019

    Repeat of a farce in the Middle East

    History repeats itself first as a tragedy, then as a farce, argued Marx. This is what has been happening in the Middle East over the past few weeks...

  • June 14, 2019

    Can Modi walk the talk?

    It is amazing how little it takes for the emperor to restitute himself after all that happened in the just-concluded campaign for the most...

  • May 24, 2019

    Return of Narendra Modi

    Doubtless, the credit for this overwhelming and landslide victory goes to Prime Minister Modi and his doppelganger Amit Shah, the BJP chief and...

  • May 17, 2019

    A bit of America in all of us

    Some years ago, in response to a piece critiquing the endless US shenanigans in the Middle East, an American reader wrote back: “Why do you hate...

  • May 10, 2019

    Untold story of the land of the free

    Growing up in small-town India, my earliest introduction to English language and fiction were ‘cowboy’ novels of authors like Oliver Strange....

  • May 03, 2019

    The media’s code of silence on Kashmir

    The Indian media boasts an illustrious history. Born during the freedom struggle against the British colonial rule, it quickly mastered the rules of...

  • April 26, 2019

    Modi’s shifting narrative

    ‘Frontline’ newsmagazine, from the stable of the ‘Hindu’ newspaper, is known for its serious, in-depth reporting as well as incisive...

  • April 19, 2019

    Between Asia and the Gulf

    The times, as Bob Dylan would sing, they are a-changin’. That the Middle East is looking East is old news. Pundits have been obsessing about the...

  • April 12, 2019

    Advani, Modi and a Greek tragedy

    In great Greek tragedies, heroes often suffer from a tragic flaw or fatal flaw of character leading to their eventual downfall. This trait could be...

  • March 29, 2019

    How India’s opposition lost the plot

    Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. You do not have to be a psephologist to predict the outcome of the critical General...

  • March 22, 2019

    New Zealand: love trumps hate

    It had been, as she put it, New Zealand’s darkest day and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shined bright like the ray of hope and sanity that she...

  • March 15, 2019

    If Modi wins again

    If Narendra Modi’s BJP romps home to victory in the just announced Indian general elections in the face of all-pervasive public anger against the...

  • March 09, 2019

    A requiem for Urdu

    Mulayam Singh Yadav is old school. Craftiest of the lot, not for nothing does he enjoy the distinction of having ruled India’s largest state for...

  • March 01, 2019

    South Asia: on the brink again

    You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time, counselled Einstein. But this is what India and Pakistan are doing right now. As I write...

  • February 22, 2019

    A perilous path from Pulwama

    Pulwama couldn’t have come at a worse time for all those who believe in peace, humanity and a shared destiny for South Asia.I am shocked and...

  • February 15, 2019

    Springtime in the Middle East

    It is springtime in the Middle East once again. It would be fair to say that I haven’t witnessed such glorious, reinvigorating weather in my long...

  • February 08, 2019

    The BJP’s B-team

    The more things change in India, the more they seem to remain the same. How else would one explain the decision to slap the draconian National...

  • February 01, 2019

    Another freedom struggle

    Barely two months are left before India goes to the polls in what is doubtless the greatest democratic spectacle on the planet. And this may be the...

  • January 25, 2019

    Priyanka and the 2019 endgame

    With Priyanka Gandhi’s entry into active politics, the Congress Party has set the cat among the pigeons. The eternal question of ‘will she or...

  • January 18, 2019

    Books can save us

    In his 1905 essay celebrating the joys of reading, Marcel Proust wrote: “With books, there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with...

  • January 05, 2019

    Mission accomplished

    Commenting on US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan, veteran American...

  • December 29, 2018

    No country for sane voices

    The storm of abuse and sheer vitriol that greeted Naseeruddin Shah’s lament over the alarming state of the nation only proves his point. The actor...