Sandhya Jain
13 January 2009
Source: http://www.vijayvaani.com

Odd appears to be the new normal with the Indian Judiciary. It is at odds with every other institution, at odds with established convention, and proud to be so. The gains to the nation, if any, from the Judiciary's sudden desire to defy all norms and emerge as primus inter pares of the Indian polity, are questionable.

Arun Shrivastava
11 January 2009

I rarely watch TV. It was early evening, about 6 pm in Delhi, when a friend called and said, 'Have you seen it?' I asked, 'Seen what?' 'Switch on the TV and watch CNN or BBC', said my friend. One tower was smouldering. Perhaps this was on the channels many minutes before I switched on.

Last week, in what can only be termed extreme judicial imprudence, Justice Markandey Katju, one of the three judges on the Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, seems to have lost control to do a Barkha Dutt in his august court. Their eminences were hearing a petition filed in the Supreme Court by the Archbishop of Orissa, Raphael Cheenath and this provided the Supreme Court the opportunity for some grandstanding; leaving some of us in no doubt whatever about their intended, invisible but powerful audience.

Last week, in what can only be termed extreme judicial imprudence, Justice Markandey Katju, one of the three judges on the Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, seems to have lost control to do a Barkha Dutt in his august court. Their eminences were hearing a petition filed in the Supreme Court by the Archbishop of Orissa, Raphael Cheenath and this provided the Supreme Court the opportunity for some grandstanding; leaving some of us in no doubt whatever about their intended, invisible but powerful audience.

Romila Thapar has been awarded the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity for ostensibly creating "a new and more pluralistic view of Indian civilization, which had seemed more unitary and unchanging, by scrutinizing its evolution over two millennia and searching out its historical consciousness". Thapar’s US Congressional acclamation seeks to validate a blatantly provocative, uni-dimensional and ideologically extreme view of India’s past, espoused mainly by its Stalinist fifth column, assorted Islamist Jihadis and militant Christian evangelists. The Kluge Prize selection committee might have imposed a simple test on Thapar by requiring her to present examples of two positive statements that she has composed on the Hindu past in her entire career. Instead what the decision of the Kluge committee suggests is racial arrogance, contempt for Hindu sensibilities and the malign influence of a powerful Bostonian non-Hindu Indian, infamous for campaigns belittling Hindu suffering. The award resoundingly reaffirms a deep American animus against Hindu India that has been a constant feature of US foreign policy towards it since independence. It was this vicious hatred and a half-baked strategic calculus that prompted US support for the perpetration of Pakistan’s genocide in East Pakistan in 1971.