Tavleen Singh

Tavleen Singh, a leading Columnist associated with The Indian Express. Find all Columns from Tavleen Singh here.

Tavleen Singh writes: On the triumphalist Hindutva movement that now claims that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu monument, I have one question: when do bulldozers arrive to demolish the most famous mausoleum in the world?

Sycophants are dangerous

Sun, May 08, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Sycophants have a place in autocracies where for a while they thrive by singing praises to the Dear Leader, but even there, they end up weakening him eventually instead of helping him become a better autocrat.

Stop this violence

Sun, May 01, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Mohan Bhagwat deserves respect for saying what he did. What is very hard to understand is why it was not the Prime Minister who took the lead in saying something about the deliberate targeting of the Muslim community by his chief ministers, ministers, acolytes, Twitter warriors and party spokesmen.

Bulldozing to instill terror

Sun, Apr 24, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: So, the homes and businesses smashed to smithereens in Delhi were in a Muslim area from which stones were thrown at a Hindu religious procession. The BJP chose its most aggressive spokesmen to defend this policy on primetime.

Bulldozing justice

Wed, Apr 20, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: What we saw in Khargone was the law of the jungle

Fanatics become fashionable

Sun, Apr 10, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Fanaticism and religiosity go together, so it is difficult to say whether it has been the extreme religiosity of the past few years that has created this deluge of fanatics, or something else.

What harms India’s stature

Sun, Apr 03, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: The only thing that gratuitous violence achieves is to create more gratuitous violence, and to create the impression that in India the rule of law is slowly weakening.

Dissent is so absent from the conversations in India today

Mon, Mar 28, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Dissent is so absent from the conversations in India today that there are not even questions asked about why we have not moved away from our debilitating dependence on Russian armaments decades after the Soviet Union died.

Kashmir needs a balm

Sun, Mar 20, 2022

Jagmohan was a trusted hatchet man who had proved his loyalty to the Gandhi family during the Emergency by obeying Sanjay Gandhi’s orders to bulldoze slums in Delhi in the name of ‘beautification’.

Voting for a ‘new’ India

Sun, Mar 13, 2022

It was not a bad slogan and indeed a worthy cause, but the tenor of the gathering indicated that it came from an old Congress playbook from a time when the language of political power was English.

On Ukraine, speak up India

Sun, Mar 06, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: It should shame us all that we could end up being on the wrong side of history because of some twisted idea of ‘national interest’. In a war that could have autocracies pitted against democracies, it cannot possibly be in India’s national interest to be on the side of monsters like Putin.

Truth, lies & propaganda

Sun, Feb 27, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: There must be geopolitical reasons why we cannot always stand firmly on the side of democracies, but as I have no understanding of them, I shall now write about what I intended to this week before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Confusing Islam with Islamism

Sun, Feb 20, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Karnataka’s BJP government has handled the protests so foolishly that the entire conversation has become about whether Muslim girls should be deprived of an education simply because they insist on wearing their ‘religious symbol’.

Look behind the hijab

Mon, Feb 14, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: The protest is no longer about Muslim girls being denied access to education but Muslim girls becoming unwitting pawns of political forces whose ideology and ideas are the opposite of the ideas that define India in our Constitution.

Rahul Gandhi’s delusions

Sun, Feb 06, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: There is a great deal that is dangerous and dishonest about Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. But, to listen to Rahul Gandhi’s long and rambling speech in the Lok Sabha was to realise that if he remains the only challenger that the Congress party produces, Modi will continue to look much, much better.

Betrayal by our political leaders

Sun, Jan 30, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: It should shame Indian politicians and policymakers that a government job remains the ultimate Indian dream in the year that we celebrate 75 years of independence.

Criticism of government and PM’s policies does not amount to India’s image being ‘tarnished’

Sun, Jan 23, 2022

🔴 The tragic reality is that millions of Indians cannot afford even to go to court to seek justice when they are deprived of their rights. It is this that should worry our leaders.

Sycophancy on social media

Sun, Jan 16, 2022

🔴 The tweets I read every day range from vicious, abusive and ugly, to idiotic, ignorant and insane. They come from both sides of the divide in these politically polarized times.

The breach was serious

Mon, Jan 10, 2022

Tavleen Singh writes: Had the Government of India taken the breach in the Prime Minister’s security perimeter seriously, it would cooperate with the Punjab government to investigate what went wrong.

Goodbye, 2021

Tue, Jan 04, 2022

🔴 The year which ended was so filled with bad times that it is hard to mourn its passing

Fanatics take charge

Thu, Dec 30, 2021

🔴 Tavleen Singh writes: The consequences of mixing communal hatred, religiosity, and hyper-nationalism into the normal business of political life are now clear to see.

Give them circuses

Thu, Dec 30, 2021

🔴 Tavleen Singh writes: The truth is that not much has changed in any real way in UP since the ‘double-engine government’ came into existence in 2017, and it is this reason why it is important to divide Hindus and Muslims for Yogi to win a second term.