As a guest at the G-7 summit in the United Kingdom in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a special session on “open societies,” where he highlighted his country’s “civilizational commitment to democracy, freedom of thought, and liberty.” Modi’s remarks were laudable, as was India’s support for a G-7 joint statement reaffirming a “shared belief in open societies, democratic values and multilateralism.” Yet only months before, the democracy watchdog Freedom House had downgraded India from “free” to “partly free,” citing a “multiyear pattern” of “rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and . . . a crackdown on expressions of dissent” under the Modi government.
Madhya Pradesh-Based Voluntary Organization Working To Uplift Children With Special Needs newsindiatimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsindiatimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ved Mehta, whose monumental autobiography explored life in India, dies at 86 Harrison Smith Ved Mehta, an author and journalist who helped introduce Americans to Indian history and culture, most notably in an epic 12-volume autobiography that melded the personal and political, recalling his childhood vision loss and the traumas of Indian partition, died Jan. 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Linn Cary Mehta. Mr. Mehta wrote for the New Yorker magazine for more than three decades, reporting on Oxford philosophers, Christian theologians, Noam Chomsky’s polarizing linguistic theories and the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, whose disciples he spent years interviewing in the 1970s, long after the Indian independence leader was assassinated.