Ramchandra Guha

Historian Ramachandra Guha on Tuesday said that to "revive" healthy democracy in India in which one party does not steamroll the Opposition, a lot depends on the Congress becoming more competitive, which won't happen merely through a march but by winning votes. Guha was speaking at the launch of the third edition of his seminal work, "India After Gandhi", here. "Objectively, it is only the Congress that has a footprint, shall we say, in eight to 12 states. So to have healthy democracy in which one party does not steamroll the Opposition, the kind that India experienced from the late 1970s till 2014, to revive that, to restore it, which I believe would be very good for all of us, it would depend a lot on the Congress becoming more competitive," he claimed. To buttress his point, Guha spoke about how among all other parties it was the Congress that fought the BJP head-to-head in as many as 191 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He claimed the same would happen in the 2024 general

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani also responded to Guha's tweet saying that Indians would not fall for "tricks" of dividing them

Vikram Limaye has also refused to accept the payment due to him, citing the same reason

The letter was written by 49 eminent personalities, including filmmakers Mani Ratnam, Anurag Kashyap, Shyam Benegal and others

Either the BJP does not care or else the forces of Hindutva can no longer control what they have unleashed

The detail in Ramachandra Guha's magisterial biography occasionally comes at the cost of interpretation and meaning