Word: indias
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...about rendering the Buddha's likeness gave way, and the world embarked on two millenniums of rich iconography and statuary. The gallery's 47 masterworks, culled from the museum's renowned Asian collections, trace the Buddha's portrayal from the 2nd to 19th centuries, in places as diverse as India, Java and Japan. (See 10 things to do in London...
...ancient civilization with a rich and diverse heritage, India remains uncomfortable with the defining event of its modern political history - the cataclysmic Partition of 1947 that left a million people dead in fratricidal massacres and caused the largest-ever cross-migration in human history. Six decades after that bloody split which doomed India to seemingly eternal enmity with its conjoined twin, the state of Pakistan, Partition still defines the contours of Indian politics and some of its biggest challenges, from the festering dispute in Kashmir to Islamist and Hindu right-wing terrorism...
...also has led to conflict within India's political establishment. Last week, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist bloc that leads the opposition in Parliament, expelled Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister in a BJP government and party stalwart. His crime? To have published a revisionist book on the history of Partition and, in particular, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Muslim Pakistan who Indians of all political stripes have often blamed for the violent sundering of the Subcontinent. Singh's Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence portrays Jinnah as a secularist and a great statesman...
...Indeed, the spat over Jinnah has highlighted the profound crisis facing India's most prominent opposition party. Its rise less than two decades ago as a dominant force in Indian national politics coincided with the opening up of the country's economy and the emergence of a more confident, muscular middle-class. Its leaders were in power until a little over five years back, when the party lost the elections then by a thin margin. But those days seem long gone. The humbled BJP is now faced with serious questions over its leadership, seen to be out of sync with...
...problem runs deeper - ever since an overwhelming mandate in this year's elections returned the centre-left Congress party to power, the BJP has been caught in ideological drift, unsure of its own identity and role as India grows into a world power. On Monday, BJP stalwart Arun Shourie urged the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP's mother organization and champion of Hindu nationalist orthodoxy, to "take over" the party, implying that the only way the party could get its act together is to go back to the lock-step discipline of the RSS. This, however, would also entail...