Pakistan's Reality Bytes

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Oneupmanship has always been an integral part of the schizophrenic love-hate relationship that exists between India and Pakistan. Sometimes serious, often innocuous , Indians and Pakistanis have reveled in comparisons. Was Imran Khan a superior all-rounder to Kapil Dev? (tough one, dead heat, I would say). Was Noorjehan a better singer than Lata Mangeshkar? (no contest, there is only one Lata). Is the Pakistani army more combat ready than the Indians? (again, no contest, size does matter). Are Pakistani politicians less corrupt than their Indian counterparts? (close one, although we still haven't had a president who spent seven years in jail). On most counts, we'd like to believe that we are well ahead of the Pakistanis: films, music, art, theatre, there is a rich diversity and tradition to Indian culture that our friends across the border find tough to match. Let me though now suggest one area, perhaps....

Welcome to IBNPolitics.com

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"If the British left, India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages." So spoke Sir Winston Churchill in 1930. It's 62 years since the British left the country, the idea of India has survived, even flourished. Central to Churchill being proven wrong has been the resilience of Indian democracy. There is no greater exhibition of democracy in action than an Indian election. April-May 2009 promises to be the largest democratic exercise of its kind in the history of the modern world: given the fact that we are a billion-plus nation (and growing), it is apparent that every election breaks the record set by the previous one in terms of the sheer numbers who participate in the exercise. Capturing this remarkable expression of political freedom is one of the great joys, and challenges of any news organization. For us....

Manmohan as Brown Sahib

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In good health, Dr Manmohan Singh was dismissed by his critics as a 'weak' prime minister; in sickness, he is acknowledged as being indispensable to the ruling UPA. That no single individual has been asked to fill in for the prime minister as he recovers from a heart surgery may reflect the insecurities of the Congress leadership, but it also does suggest that Dr Singh is now regarded as more than just first among equals. And yet, when in around six weeks time, the prime minister is back on his feet, there is every possibility that the Congress and the UPA will have little time for Manmohan the campaigner in the run up to General Elections 2009. For some strange reason, the Congress party has been reluctant to project the prime minister as an electoral asset. During the Karnataka elections in May 2008, for....