No less than Narendra Modi, India’s erudite prime minister, had attributed the self-disparaging Indian character to its thousand years of slavery, that too on the floor of the Indian parliament. And it’s no wonder that Asaduddin Owaisi, the Islamist revivalist in the Indian remnant, promptly contested the said proposition. Needless to say, while Modi echoed the lament of the Hindu nationalists, albeit in a politically correct vocabulary, Owaisi sees the Muslim invasion of Hindustan through the prism of eight-hundred years of Islamic hukummat over the same. Whatever, a critical examination of India’s Islamic history, even the one dished out by its Muslim overlords, and an objective anal...

‘What ails India’ has been the subject matter of the left-lib right-wing tussle for long, what with the cynics chipping in, in between. However, the right-wing assault on the left-lib ‘Idea of India’, facilitated by Narendra Modi’s nationalist rise in the Indian political firmament, has only increased the intensity of the scrimmage. Be that as it may, this is to throw a new ‘right’ light on India’s ‘left’ plight that has been Bharat’s bane, for a fresh look at it.  In Kitab al-Hind, Al-Biruni had stated that “the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs”, and...