"Are there no limits to what Muslims can demand, and get away with, in the imagined cause of their religion? ... There is no reason why our political leaders should have to start kowtowing and running scared everytime a bunch of semi-literate mullahs gets up and starts making a noise. ... We have just seen Shiv-Sena government in Maharashtra buckle under Muslim pressure and suspend the release of Mani Rattnam’s Bombay. It is a film about inter-religious marriage and the triumph of peace over communal hatred. ... After seeing the film they came up with a list of objections so absurd that they should have been considered ludicrous in our secular land but they have been taken seriously. They object, we are told, to the last shot. The Muslim girl while eloping with her Hindu husband carried the Koran in her hand. This was bad, they said, because it seemed to imply that her marriage had Islamic sanction. ... Nor did they approve of the film’s first scene which shows a woman lifting her burqa off her face.... Offence was taken, we are told, because a Hindu family was shown being burned alive. A Muslim family is also shown being similarly murdered, because this also happened in the terrible riots of 1992, but our Muslim objectors are selective in their disapproval."

“The 2014 general election marked the beginning of the end of India’s ruling elite. The election whose results came last week marked the end. As someone born and bred in this group of privileged Indians, I speak as an insider. So believe me when I tell you that we controlled everything. Politics, government, business, foreign policy, the police, the military and the media. All this was possible because we were to some degree all courtiers in the court of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty since the British left. We knew that their ‘socialism’ and ‘secularism’ were as fake as their ‘idea of India’.... If they have spent the past five years targeting Modi, often wrongly, for what they perceive as attempts to crush democracy, it is possibly because they know how easily this can be done. The truth is that the traditional ruling elite believes in an idea of India in which there are privileges and not rights. This was always a bad idea. Now it is dead.”

“Dynasty, a political tool in the hands of the ruling class, has become the catalyst for a new colonization of a country whose soul has already been deeply scarred by centuries of it.”

“Last week I went to see Arun Jaitley. He is one of the few politicians whom I respect. I have known him from the time I was a junior reporter and can say honestly that he is one of a handful of politicians who is not in politics for personal gain but for public service. He is in the process of moving out of the house in Lutyens’ Delhi that was allotted to him as a senior minister. While waiting to see him I noticed blank spaces on the walls where pictures have been taken down. His decision to surrender his government house as soon as he demitted office is remarkable in itself. I know millionaires and maharajahs who have to be physically evicted.”

“When I heard Aung San Suu Kyi's address to both houses of Britian's Parliament in Westminster hall last week, what impressed me was the clarity with which she spelt out her vision for her country. But, throughout her speech, something kept bothering me and by the time she finished, I discovered what it was. What bothered me was that I could not think of a single Indian leader who could make such a speech. The Indian political landscape today has become a desert in which only the stunted progeny of stunted political leaders bloom. We need our political parties to throw up real leaders and we need a political discourse in which real political problems are discussed. So can we stop fishing 'secularism' out of the dustbin of history and holding it up as a shining ideal? Its relevance faded a long time ago.”

“This is why it has been so astonishingly easy for the Gandhi dynasty to turn India’s oldest political party into a family firm. And once dynastic succession became acceptable at the highest levels of political power, it became impossible to prevent dynastic democracy spreading like a slow poison into the very soul of India. It spread horizontally at higher levels of leadership in every political party and vertically down to the lowest levels of grassroots democracy. It has now become almost impossible to find a village council that is free of this debilitating disease. ... India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ could more appropriately have been called India’s tryst with dynasty.”

“It was the first time an Indian prime minister had been so open about his religion and a tremor of fear went up the ‘secular’ spine of Lutyens’ Delhi. Friends who had never see the Ganga puja or Benares said that they loved the ceremony but they were worried about the message this would send to Muslims and Christians. So they readied their ammunition for the attack on Modi’s secular credentials that began within months of his becoming prime minister.”