RSS feed

Soutik Biswas Delhi correspondent

This is where to come for my take on life and times in the world’s largest democracy

Ramayana: An 'epic' controversy

"How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been?" wondered the late poet and scholar AK Ramanujan of the Indian epic in a compelling essay he wrote for a University of Pittsburgh conference in 1987.

Twenty four years later, the essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas:Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation, finds itself at the centre of a fresh controversy. It has been dropped from the history syllabus of Delhi University after protests from hardline Hindu groups and a number of teachers. They believe the many versions recounted in the essay offend Hindu beliefs.

Read full article

Is India in the throes of 'distress migration'?

Are millions of Indians being forced to leave their villages for cities and towns because there aren't enough jobs at home and farm incomes are drying up? Is this "distress migration" unprecedented in India's history?

Award-winning journalist P Sainath thinks so. Examining the latest census data, he finds that India's urban population has risen more (91 million more than in the 2001 census) than the rural population (90.6 million more than in the 2001 census). Nearly half the people in states like Tamil Nadu already live in urban settlements.

Read full article

An image makeover for Narendra Modi?

Is India's most controversial and divisive politician emerging as a prime ministerial candidate?

Supporters of Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, believe so. For evidence, they point to his much-hyped three-day, tax-payer-funded hunger strike in an air-conditioned hall for social and religious harmony over the weekend, which ends on Monday. The fast, they believe, enabled him to reach out to the Muslim minority, who bore the brunt of widespread religious riots in the state - following the torching of a passenger train carrying Hindu pilgrims in 2002.

Read full article

Land bill: A new deal for farmers?

Conflicts over land are deepening India's development fault lines.

In recent years, farmers have clashed with the police while resisting efforts by the government to take over their land for factories and housing, challenged the setting up of vast special economic zones, and even scuppered a car factory being built on farmland acquired by the government. Scenting votes, politicians have rushed in to commiserate with irate farmers protesting at the takeover of their land.

Read full article

Bombs bring sickening sense of deja vu

There seems to be no respite from terror in India.

Two months after 26 people were killed in Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi has been attacked again. Shopping areas, bus stops, cinema halls and a mosque have been targeted in recent years in the capital. On Wednesday morning, people queuing up to enter its busy high court bore the brunt of what is reported to have been a "briefcase bomb".

Read full article

A reality check for India

Anna Hazare is no stranger to hunger strikes. The activist's fast at Delhi's sprawling Ramlila grounds was his 16th since 1980. But, at 13 days, it was his longest. It was also his most significant ever.

He took on India's troubled government by demanding the setting up of a powerful anti-corruption ombudsman, or Lokpal, with sweeping powers to investigate every part of the government. By the time he ended his fast, the former army lorry driver-turned-activist had galvanised large numbers of Indians in the "war against corruption" and become a national figure.

Read full article

Soutik added analysis to:

India's Hazare begins public fast

The police offer which will permit Anna Hazare to go on a hunger strike in a park for 15 days is being seen by observers as a major climbdown by the government.

But what happens next? There are unverified reports that the government is trying hard to reach a compromise with Mr Hazare, who insists that his version of the anti-corruption bill has to be placed before parliament.

Read full article

Soutik added analysis to:

India activist makes release deal

The police offer which will permit Anna Hazare to go on a hunger strike in a park for 15 days is being seen by observers as a major climbdown by the government.

But what happens next? There are unverified reports that the government is trying hard to reach a compromise with Mr Hazare, who insists that his version of the anti-corruption bill has to be placed before parliament.

Read full article

Arrest complicates corruption debate

Has India's battle against corruption become a contest between the tyranny of virtue and the tyranny of the state, as some analysts put it?

The police have arrested anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare for pledging to go ahead with a hunger strike against a proposed new anti-corruption law.

Read full article

Is India's cricket debacle the worst ever?

Cricket is a great leveller. For the past 21 months India had been the top Test team in the world. In April they became the world champions, lifting the World Cup after nearly three decades.

Nothing could seemingly go wrong with this indisputably talented team with the best batting line-up in the world. Mahendra Singh Dhoni was the captain with the Midas touch, leading India to dominate the world of cricket in all formats of the game, including the fickle Twenty20.

Read full article

India's activists on warpath against the government

The battle lines are drawn: it is the government versus "civil society" in India now.

A controversial anti-corruption bill has been tabled in parliament, and a showdown with "civil society" representatives, backed by an energetic section of the media, looms.

Read full article

Why India risks losing cricket's top spot

The front page headlines summed up the mood of cricket lovers after India was decimated for the second time in a row by England at Nottingham on Monday.

Not since 2008 have India lost two Tests in a series. The margins of defeat at Lords and Nottingham - 196 and 319 runs - have been downright embarrassing. Its star-studded batting line-up managed a mere 992 runs in four innings compared with England's more than 1,500 runs.

Read full article

Challenges ahead for India reforms

Twenty years ago Manmohan Singh, an Oxford trained economist, invoked Victor Hugo to usher in economic reforms in India. "No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come," he said. Mr Singh was the finance minister in a wobbly minority government and an unlikely agent to set off seismic economic changes in a country used to an appalling 3.5% "Hindu rate of growth".

But, as with most things in India, Mr Singh's reforms in 1991 were a response to a grave crisis. The country was wilting under a $70m debt, foreign exchange reserves were down to two weeks of imports, and the central bank was pawning gold as collateral for a loan. Earlier in the year Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber on the general election campaign. It was also a time, as leading analyst Swaminathan S Anklesaria Iyer writes in a terrific paper, when India was viewed "globally as a bottomless pit for foreign aid, periodically hit by food and exchange crises and hamstrung by an immense web of controls imposed in the holy name of socialism and then used by politicians to line their pockets and build patronage networks". The country was variously described as a caged tiger and a sleeping elephant. China was already a tiger economy.

Read full article

Sex selection: The forgotten story

Did the West stoke the scourge of sex selection in Asia?

A strong socio-cultural preference for boys in conservative Asian societies is blamed for most of the sex selection. In overwhelmingly patriarchal India, dowry makes daughters expensive. China's one-child policy is thought to be a trigger as women abort girls to have a single boy.

Read full article

Why does Mumbai bleed again and again?

Some 700 people have been killed in more than half a dozen militant attacks in Mumbai since 1993, including the horrific assault in November 2008. And the violence shows no signs of abating.

The most commonly peddled narrative is that by attacking its much touted financial and entertainment capital, you deal a body blow to India and get global media attention. But that is only a small part of the story. Many residents will tell you that Mumbai began going downhill in early 1993 when it convulsed in religious rioting and murder for two weeks following the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu fanatics in December 1992. At least 900 people died, mostly Muslims. Two months after the riots, the underworld set off series of bombs to avenge the riots, killing more than 250 people. Many of them were Muslims too.

Read full article

Is India's population policy sexist?

Can the promise of a car or a mixer grinder help keep India's population in check?

Well, that's what health authorities in the northern state of Rajasthan apparently believe. They are offering a cheap car, among other things, as a prize in an attempt to sign up some 20,000 people to meet an ambitious sterilisation target. Time will tell whether this turns out to be another gimmick or an innovative incentive.

Read full article

The feisty Indian kings and their temple treasure

What do we know about the Indian kings who presided over the Kerala temple where an extraordinary treasure trove has reportedly been found?

The royal family of India's erstwhile southern kingdom of Travancore has a long history of resistance. A year before independence in 1947, the kingdom - one of more than 500 princely states - raised the banner of revolt and demanded freedom for itself.

Read full article

River of Smoke

It is 1838, and Amitav Ghosh's new novel, River Of Smoke, sails into Canton, a rambunctious, crowded city, and home to seafarers, itinerant merchants, opium traders and many such floating folks. "In China, everything new comes from Canton," says a character, in what is the second book in a planned trilogy.

The exotic, tiny Fanqui town - or foreigners' town - appears to have been the most exciting part of the city. Thousands of men from all over the world live cramped in a little sliver of a place, one of the "last and greatest of all the world's caravanserais". It is also the hub of a thriving opium business where traders from Europe and India exchange their deadly cargo for tea, silk, porcelain and silver.

Read full article

Why India is in dire need of electoral reform

India's democracy is facing serious challenges.

Nearly a third of MPs - 158 of 543, to be precise - in the parliament face criminal charges. Seventy-four of them face serious charges such as murder and abduction. There are more than 500 criminal cases against these lawmakers.

Read full article

The Burmese teenagers who fled to India

On lonely nights in Delhi's boiling summers, Lai Ram Thang yearns to return to his bamboo and thatch village home in balmy Chin state in western Burma.

Hriphi, says the 17-year-old boy, is a simple village where simple people live.

Read full article

About Soutik

Before joining the BBC, Soutik worked with Indian newspapers and magazines and an international newspaper as a correspondent and an editor.

He was a Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Soutik has covered elections in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, the tsunami in India and Sri Lanka in 2005, and militancy in Kashmir, working mostly on a series of stories on the state of youth and women in the disputed region.

In 2005, he used a laptop link to connect BBC News readers from around the world to a people living in a Pashtun village in Afghanistan. He revisited the village two years later to do a similar project and to see how life had changed.

He loves blues and jazz, and believes Derek Trucks is the best and most innovative slide guitarist alive.

He is a big movie buff, with Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen and Satyajit Ray among his favourite directors.

More correspondents

  • Damian Grammaticas Damian Grammaticas Beijing correspondent

    The people, power and politics of China


  • Mark Mardell Mark Mardell North America editor

    The big debates in US politics and life beyond Washington


  • Gavin Hewitt Gavin Hewitt Europe editor

    The arguments over Europe, its politics and personalities


bbc.co.uk navigation

BBC © 2011 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.