India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has just won elections in three important states and it has done so without playing its usual Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, card. Instead of relying on anti-Muslim sentiments, it defeated Congress, India's main opposition party - which is stuck in a time warp under its dynastic leader, Sonia Gandhi - with development-oriented slogans of "bijli, sadak, pani" (electricity, roads and water).

What the campaigns in [...]

Like America and Israel, India believes it is the victim of international terrorism. The country feels constantly threatened by neighbour- ing Pakistan's encouragement of terrorists in its disputed northern state of Kashmir and it reckons that George W Bush's "axis of evil" should stretch to include Pakistan.

The Bush administration, however, does not entirely agree. Its primary interest is to do nothing that might disrupt the help it receives from [...]

When I was first posted to India by the Financial Times in 1983, it was only a few years after Indira Gandhi's 1975-77 state of emergency, when Mark Tully of the BBC was thrown out of the country - along with one or two other foreign reporters - and Indian journalists were jailed. Not surprisingly, the FT told me, only half joking: "You might not actually be away long, because [...]

Your friendly local corner shop may seem an unlikely place to find links to religiously motivated violence and ethnic cleansing. But the Patels, a community (some say caste) who originally came from the Indian state of Gujarat, played an important role in the troubles that engulfed the state in March and April.

Together with other overseas Gujaratis in the UK and the US, Patels are among those who help [...]

For many Indian people, the vicious killings, rapes and burning of property in Gujarat in February and March have confirmed their worst fears: that there is no political party in India capable of governing the country effectively. The riots, in which more than 700 people died, also fuelled worries about whether India is indeed governable in its current state of social and political development. Is this ancient civilisation, and potentially [...]

A rusting maze of pipes and girders still marks the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, which has caused the deaths of around 20,000 people in the central Indian city of Bhopal. The tank that leaked deadly methyl isocyanate at the end of 1984 stands in overgrown grass, resembling a beached antique submarine. All around, the ground contains what Greenpeace has described as "hot spots of severe [...]

India's post-independence traditions, liberal and secular, are coming under increasing threat, and education is the latest battleground. Astrology has been introduced as a science subject in universities and there are plans to make Sanskrit teaching compulsory in primary schools. And, in the words of opposition critics, ministers are trying to "Talibanise" the history books.

Behind the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the country's coalition government, stands the hard-line Hindu [...]

A very senior member of the Bush administration is said to have told a European colleague a few days after 11 September: "We have taken this crap from Pakistan about its lack of involvement in terrorism for long enough. Now is our chance to sort them out." Yet just a couple of weeks later, Pakistan and the United States have cosied their way into another love-in, their first since the [...]

"What is your Clause Four?" I asked a group of Congress Party leaders who recently visited London. They had come to try to learn from new Labour how to rejuvenate India's once all-powerful, but now demoralised, political party. "What symbolic change can you make to show that you really mean business about starting 'new' Congress?" The answer was instant: "Stop sitting on the floor to hold our central working committee [...]

She was an unlikely nemesis - a four-foot-something, attractive Asian lady who told the nation in a 1997 Valentine's Day message: "I treasure true love. I want you to be part of my dream."

In fact, this American-educated former economics professor and senior Filipino politician played a central role in the downfall of President Joseph Estrada, succeeding him in the job that he had held for two and a half [...]