Articles by M S Prabhakara

The characterisation of politics as a positively corrupt enterprise, unworthy of and against the interests of the great Indian people in whose name such activities are carried on, is a sinister agenda of seeing politics and public affairs as infected isolates, which need to be and indeed can be dispensed with and eradicated.

The very concept of a land-locked state as well as the underlying assumption that having a 'closed border' is somewhat of an impediment to growth can be questioned. While the supposed landlocked status of the north-east region as a whole has received a lot of attention, a related feature of the region, that many of its smaller components are internally locked and so face some formidable problems, has hardly received any attention. While whether the north-east is landlocked or not may be a matter of perspective and interpretation, the most emphatically undeniable reality is that the seven constituent states of the region are internally locked - themselves locked and locking out others, unable to connect with each other physically in terms of poor transport links, and more seriously, unable to make connections intellectually and emotionally with their closest neighbours, or even with and among their own people.

The vulgarisation of rational political choice that is dictated by necessity and informed by a value judgment of the performance of a political party in office, to behaviourist mystique, ignores that politics is necessarily a complex, messy and unpredictable process. While the political choices are rational, the political process is not always so.