However the Doklam crisis is eventually resolved, it should not obscure the potential for genuine cooperation with China in tackling another crisis - one with arguably greater stakes for India and the world at large.

Though I spent much of Election Day (19 May) before the national English and Hindi media discussing the electoral debacle of the Congress, I did not do so in an official capacity. I am not a party spokesman, a member of the Congress Working Committee, nor of any of its decision-making bodies. But as an individual member and elected MP of the Congre...

Our attitude has become that it is always easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.

Unless the voices of those calling for a humane and broad-minded view of the Indian nation are heard, we are in danger of being reduced to the very thing our forefathers rejected in 1947 - a Hindu Pakistan.

My late father, Chandran Tharoor, used to tell me more than five decades ago that India is not just the world's largest democracy, it is also the world's largest hypocrisy. The wisdom and accuracy of his perception was again on display when my second attempt to introduce a Private Member's Bill to amend Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was defe...

With his compelling fluency and brilliant rhetoric, his impish smile and sardonic humour, his mastery of idiomatic Hindi and his manifest sincerity, Kanhaiya seems to represent the idealism and passion long felt to be absent in the political class. In explicit contrast to the practised and cynical politicians running the nation, he offers an authen...

A great deal has already been written about the arrest of JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and the ensuing national uproar. But the drama highlights a broader danger: the growing evidence that the BJP is orchestrating a deliberate and strategic assault on Indian universities.

The measures taken by the Prime Minister in response to the decades-long Netaji controversy missed the forest for one set of trees. India still lacks comprehensive and accountable routines for maintaining accessible public records.

My recent Twitter spat with Anupam Kher has, somewhat to my own surprise, been blown up out of all proportion, with thousands of retweets and several articles in the newspapers over an essentially innocuous exchange.

There's a price to be paid for bigotry, and the whole nation is paying it.

The objective of the law is supposed to be to put in place an updated and modern practice of Alternate Dispute Resolution. Yet there are no provisions that encourage the use of technology during arbitration proceedings.

The tide has turned. The main beneficiaries of this transformation can only be the Indian people.

The "manufactured controversy" (to quote our honourable Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley) over the return by over 40 writers of their Sahitya Akademi Awards in protest against the Dadri butchery of Mohammed Akhlaq and related killings refuses to die down.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is back from the US, and to read some of the encomia showered on him, view the breathless coverage on Indian media, and listen to the over-the-top pronouncements of government and BJP spokesmen, it would seem that this second trip to America was nothing short of the Second Coming.

Swachh Bharat should not be reduced to one more Modi public-relations gimmick, more visible in the headlines than in the streets.