The Jeep Scandal: Independent India’s First Corruption Controversy
A wartime purchase of jeeps for Kashmir, a contract signed in London, and a file closed in Parliament. The 1948 jeep scandal set the template for how India handles corruption charges.
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The Bhawal Sannyasi Case: The Dead Prince Who Came Back
A prince cremated in Darjeeling in 1909, a sadhu in Dhaka in 1921, and a thirty seven year legal battle that ended at the Privy Council. The strangest identity trial in Indian history.
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The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the Trial at the Red Fort
Three shots at Birla House, a conspiracy traced from Pune to Gwalior, and a trial inside the Red Fort. How independent India prosecuted its first and most consequential murder.
Read MoreReferendum 2020 and After: The Khalistan Question Today
Unaudited diaspora plebiscites, the Amritpal episode and its sympathy vote, drones and designations at the edges, and no measurable constituency in Punjab itself: the Khalistan question today, assessed without inflation or innocence.
Read MoreThe Diaspora and the Politics of Memory
Two remembered eras diverging from one record: how the diaspora's curated memory of 1984 became referendum politics, then statecraft, from gurdwara calendars to the Nijjar affair, and why only an assembled ledger answers a curated one.
Read MoreFrom Ghallughara to Satluj: Cinema and the Memory of the Dark Years
From Maachis through the banned biopics to the three year war over the Khalra film released as Satluj: how Indian cinema remembered and was forbidden to remember the Punjab years, and what the screen can and cannot settle.
Read MoreTruth Without Reconciliation: Punjab’s Unfinished Accounting
Punjab's dark years are not unknown; they are unassembled, documented in fragments each constituency curates and no institution was ever mandated to compose. The condition of truth without reconciliation, named, and the final batch it organises.
Read MoreThe NHRC Cremations Case: A Reckoning Cut Short
The Supreme Court's 1996 reference promised an audit of the disappearances; a quarter century later the NHRC had compensated 1,500 families within the original sample and investigated no culpability. The reckoning was not defeated but formatted.
Read MoreThe Courts and the Carnage: Justice for 1984 and the Punjab Years
Ten commissions and a generation for the pogrom's convictions, massacres extinguished by encounter rather than adjudicated, dozens of police convictions against thousands of documented disappearances: the judicial record's shape, assembled.
Read MoreThe Cost in Numbers: Counting the Dead of Punjab’s Dark Years
Above twenty one thousand by the official count, a third or more higher once the disappeared are entered, five thousand dead in the peak year alone, concentrated in the Majha and in one rural generation: the era's arithmetic, assembled and explained.
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