• OPINION

  Trump, the un-American strongman

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 29/03/2016

  » US politics today presents, to this foreign observer at least, a very un-American spectacle. A country originally built on immigration is awash with popular hatred against immigrants. A candidate of the right rails against free trade and foreigners, while that of the left proclaims his faith in socialism. Xenophobia is rife. Class war seems perilously close to the surface.

• OPINION

  'Gangsta Islam' has very little to do with religion

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 21/04/2016

  » 'Islam's borders are bloody," Samuel Huntington once wrote, "and so are its innards." Since the Sept 11 attacks, that conventional wisdom has fuelled a bizarre search for the Islamic roots of modern terrorism.

• OPINION

  Trumpism meets defeat in London

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 10/05/2016

  » Donald Trump became last week the presumptive Republican nominee in the US presidential elections. But those condemned to agonising suspense and anxiety until November should note that Trumpism, or the politics of hate and fear, also suffered a major defeat last week.

• OPINION

  What's driving the global spread of demagogues?

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 01/06/2016

  » In Austria last month, nearly half of the electorate voted for the presidential candidate of a party set up by former Nazis. The politics of fear unequivocally triumphed in Assam, a state in India's northeast, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party came to power for the first time on an explicitly xenophobic platform.

• OPINION

  Trump brings issues to the fore

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 08/08/2016

  » Political life in the West, it is safe to say, has not witnessed a figure such as Donald Trump for decades. His attacks on the parents of army captain Humayun Khan, who died on duty in Iraq in 2004, is the latest jaw-dropping episode from his presidential campaign. But as he lurches toward what one hopes will be ignominious defeat in November, we must also acknowledge two positive contributions he has made, however inadvertently, to public life.

• OPINION

  Suu Kyi's challenge

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 24/08/2016

  » Yangon is suddenly a city of "phablets". Nowhere in Asia, let alone Europe, have I seen so many supersized smartphones in public spaces, and with such egalitarian appeal: Pavement vendors selling early 20th century British guides to English grammar seem as transfixed by them as Yangon's smart set playing Pokemon Go.

• OPINION

  There's a reason why populists tend to lose elections

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 20/10/2016

  » In a democracy, the "people" are the supreme arbiters, and their wisdom speaks through the electoral process. Such is the assumption on which the modern world has been built since God and monarchs began to fade from the scene. Lately, however, the wisdom of the people has felt a bit off-key. In one country after another, from the Philippines to the US, Hungary to India, the people have chosen to boost demagogues, not to mention serial gropers.

• OPINION

  Why resistance to strongmen crumbles so quickly

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 15/11/2016

  » The election of Donald Trump, whose campaign trafficked in racism and misogyny, as the president of the United States is a calamity. But And to those who have witnessed the subsequent radical makeover of India under Mr Modi, the prospect of Mr Trump assuming supreme power brings on acute foreboding.

• OPINION

  Modi's grand plan behind rupee ban

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 01/12/2016

  » Back in 2014, Narendra Modi's landslide victory was hailed by columnists in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, who predicted that he would prove to be India's Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, modernising India's economy with a revolutionary programme of deregulation and privatisation.

• OPINION

  Cruel new world as sympathy ebbs

  News, Pankaj Mishra, Published on 12/09/2017

  » A culture of cruelty is sweeping the world and it cuts across ideological as well as national borders. In India last week, the murder of Gauri Lankesh, a prominent journalist and critic of Narendra Modi's government, was met with euphoria by his online supporters. One of Modi's own ministerial colleagues felt compelled to "strongly condemn & deplore," as he wrote on Twitter, "the messages on social media expressing happiness on the dastardly murder".

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