Ian Hall

The monsoon has now settled the dust stirred up during an eventful and blisteringly hot early summer in India. From April to June, in seven stages of voting and in temperatures that in some parts reached the high forties Celsius, almost 650 million people cast their votes in the largest election ever organised. The polls and the pundits predicted another big victory for Narendra Modi and the Bhara ... (read more)

It takes genuine courage to attempt a synoptic history of India and considerable skill to abridge the story of more than five thousand years into a book of fewer than three hundred pages. For a start, the evidence we have for what occurred during the first forty centuries is scarce and uneven. Archaeologists have unearthed planned towns, figurines, seals, pots, and tools that attest to the existen ... (read more)

In a recent interview, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was asked whether his country was heading in what his interlocutor, the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, called ‘an illiberal direction’. Bristling, Jaishankar denied the charge. India is undergoing something quite different, he argued. It is experiencing a ‘very deep democratization’. This process might be ha ... (read more)