Member of Parliament
for Thiruvananthapuram
Some years ago, I was fascinated to read in an article about Harlem, this vibrant section of the city that has given the United Nations its home, a paragraph that read:
"There is a perception that no more than two feet separate church and state at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in
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Even in our globalizing world, the question as to whether "human rights" is an essentially Western concept, which ignores the very different cultural, economic and political realities of the South, persists. Can the values of a consumer society be applied to societies with nothing to consume? At the risk of
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Zimbabwe's crisis has incited an unsettling feeling of déja vu . The reason is clear: it is, thankfully, no longer fashionable to decry colonialism's evils in assigning blame for every national misfortune. The imperial statues are toppled, cities and streets renamed, the vestiges of foreign rule either abandoned or adapted.
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The growing consensus in the West that human rights are universal has been fiercely opposed by critics in other parts of the world. At the very least, the idea may well pose as many questions as it answers. Beyond the more general, philosophical question of whether anything in our pluri-cultural,
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*Author's Note: this article was written just two days into the Israeli operation against Hamas but has appeared in syndication around the world over the last week.
AS Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of
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By Shashi Tharoor
January 10, 2009
More than six weeks after the terror attacks on Mumbai, Pakistan continues, disingenuously, to express scepticism over India's evidence and to disclaim complicity. The grudging admission that the surviving terrorist, Kasab, was Pakistani was followed by the dismissal of the official who admitted it. We should
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By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
December 07, 2008
As the country copes with the aftermath of the horrors of Mumbai, the hard work of reconstruction, of rebuilding - of reimagining our country-has begun. One genuine cause of satisfaction must be that
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By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
November 30, 2008
Keep up the Spirit to Fight
There is a savage irony to the fact that the horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The magnificent arch, built in 1911 to welcome the King-Emperor
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By Shashi Tharoor in Kerala
The Guardian, Friday 28 November 2008
This atrocity was not homegrown. But if it leads to demonisation of the nation's Muslims, the terrorists will have won
There is a savage irony to the fact that the unfolding horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway
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