Narendra modi

History has a sarcastic sense of humour, just ask Francis Fukuyama. Or eminent historians and literary ornaments of India like Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Shashi Tharoor, who are now mourning the loss of a secular liberal India under a Hindu majoritarian quasi-imperial centre. These four and their fellow academics are the first ones to blame India’s turn for the worse on the British empire, and all that it ‘made, shaped and quickened‘. This is somewhat ironic, given that Modi’s march to Kashmir is as rebellious and subaltern as it gets. Yet India’s post-colonial moral guardians are worried. ‘The passing of the act (which allowed Narendra Modi to overturn 70 years of status

I knew, the minute my job was first mooted, on the steps of San Francesco church in the sun-drenched, mafia-infested Sicilian town of Noto, that I would be the last editor of the (printed) Independent. This fact was reinforced at 17.21 on my first day, when the daily email from our circulation department put the figure for our paid-for circulation at 42,000. The closure of the Independent’s print edition was a long time coming but that doesn’t stop it being a painful shock. Introspection is inevitable. Was it my fault? How did I do? There are three parts to the job these days — editorial, commercial, digital — and one

Nearly 50 years ago, soon after I first came to this country, my landlady, upset I was reading the Guardian and not her favourite newspaper the Daily Telegraph, said, ‘You must not believe Labour propaganda that they gave India freedom. Churchill would have done the same had he won the 1945 election.’ Had my landlady been alive and witnessed how Narendra Modi has been received by David Cameron, culminating in yesterday’s love fest at Wembley, she would have required little convincing that her beloved party is no longer a pariah for Indians in this country. For all the talk of developing ties with India to attract investments and create jobs,

Dear Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Re: Urging Action by Indian government to Safeguard Freedom of Expression in Great Britain As a writer committed to protecting and defending freedom of expression around the world, I am extremely concerned about the growing intolerance towards critical voices who challenge orthodoxy in Britain. As your three-day state visit to the United Kingdom kicks off, I am urging you to engage with Prime Minister David Cameron both publicly and privately on this crucial issue. Please speak out on the current state of freedom of expression in Britain, urging Mr Cameron to stay true to the spirit of the democratic freedoms enshrined in British history, from the

As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor, an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected