AT THE recent food summit in Rome, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva donned a pair of bright-red boxing gloves labelled “Hunger Free” and waved to the cameras. They were his prize—if that is the right term—for Brazil’s success in topping a league table drawn up by ActionAid, a British charity, of countries that have done most to reduce hunger*. The occasion was a stunt, of course, but had a...

In my July 2002 column and the preface to the revised and abridged version of my 1988 book, The Hindu Equilibrium, I noted the astonishing post-modern turn in Indian history, whose canonical book Imagining India by RB Inden claimed that caste was an invention of the colonial British Raj. This ran contrary to the central theme of my book that the caste system arose in ancient India in the Indo...

The Indian government has ordered hundreds of paramilitary troops into eastern parts of the country where Maoist rebels have increasingly been taking control. This year, 669 people have died in violent incidents involving the Maoists. October was a particularly humiliating month for the Indian police. First, members of the Communist Party of India [Maoist] captured an Inspector and beheaded him. Then, a police station was attacked and two policemen killed....

Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In...

AMIT KUMAR must be one of the few bankers in the world turning away depositors. The manager of a village bank in the Indian state of Rajasthan, he was reluctant to take a cheque for 1m rupees ($21,200) from the elected head of the village, or sarpanch. The cheque was meant to pay hundreds of villagers for their work under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which guarantees 100...