Why are so many Muslims willing to kill themselves and others? It is an expression of cultural despair. Muslim civilization is disintegrating under the onset of modernity, as I argued in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). The encroaching sense of social death motivates the most horrific sort of acts.

Where do we go from here? Bearing in mind Modi's plans for 2014, we must alert Muslims of other states, in particular Bihar, UP, West Bengal and Assam. These four states have Muslim populations of between 20 % to 30 %. The BJP is weak in these states. The communal polarisation will not be so easy as it is in Gujarat, especially as there are powerful third parties that seek Muslim votes. These four states send about 200 Lok Sabha members, as against 26 from Gujarat.

Another day, another tragic massacre in the United States. As parents of the 20 children killed in Newton, Connecticut, struggle to come to terms with their agonising loss, voices are being raised for tighter gun controls. But as we all know, this is a recurring theme: each time some nut goes on a shooting spree, newspaper editorials call for tightening up gun laws.

“No set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.” So said President Obama in words of comfort in Newtown. The president was right to speak of evil, but mistaken when he called the massacre “senseless.” For this was a premeditated and purposeful act of mass murder, and the devil that did it knew exactly what he was doing and why.

“We want schools, hospitals, factories and mills so that the unemployed people get jobs,” said Mohammad Aminullah Khan, 22 years old, who drives a small van for a living. “We want a peaceful resolution to this dispute.” As they have for centuries, bearded Sadhus wander in small groups through town. So do pilgrims, who arrive in throngs for festivals. At the bus depot, sheets of saffron – a colour considered holy in Hinduism — hang from buses packed with the aged. Women in saris visit street-side stalls full of the paraphernalia of devotion: small food for offering and sacred threads, bells, and lamps. Cows lope and monkeys scamper through the crowds....

In its judgment, the Supreme Court couldn’t resist a commentary on what happened on the day of the Babri Masjid’s demolition. The Hindu community must, it said, “bear the cross on its chest for the misdeed of the miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold.” In early 1995, the frontlines of the dispute shifted back to the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The suits claiming title to the site were bundled together to be part of the same case. On the Muslim side, there was the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, which was responsible for maintaining Muslim holy sites, and six individual co-plaintiffs from Ayodhya and neighbouring areas....

A fresh government was installed in November 1990 with a new prime minister, Chandra Shekhar Singh. He was a blunt-spoken socialist. This time, the government was supported by the Congress party, led by Rajiv Gandhi. The new prime minister tried, again, to find a solution to the Ayodhya dispute. He asked Subodh Kant Sahai, then minister of state in the home ministry, to lead discussions with Hindu and Muslim representatives, eight from each side. Three chief ministers – of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh – participated to smooth tensions....

Our story begins in 1949; two years after India became an independent nation following centuries of rule by Mughal emperors and then the British. What happened back then in the dead of night in a mosque in a northern Indian town came to define the new nation, and continues to shape the world’s largest democracy today. The legal and political drama that ensued, spanning six decades, has loomed large in the terms of five prime ministers. It has made and broken political careers, exposed the limits of the law in grappling with matters of faith, and led to violence that killed thousands. And, 20 years ago this week, Ayodhya was the scene of one of the worst incidents of inter-religious brutality in India’s history....

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister, was greatly perturbed by an idol of Lord Ram being placed in a mosque. Polished, intellectual and sceptical of religion, Nehru was trying to propel the nation into an era of modern socialism and scientific thinking. But the events in Ayodhya forced him to grapple anew with the centuries-long friction between Hindus and Muslims – and to try to counter the spreading belief that a deity had materialized in the dead of night. “I am disturbed at developments at Ayodhya,” Nehru said in a telegram on Dec. 26, 1949, to Govind Ballabh Pant, chief minister of United Provinces, which roughly included what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh....

It started in 1981 in Meenakshipuram, an unremarkable village deep in the countryside of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, more than 2,000 kilometres from Ayodhya. The village hit the national news when its low-caste Hindus – about 400 families, villagers say — converted, en masse, to Islam. “We became Muslims to become equal,” said 65-year-old N. Hidayathullah, one of the converts, in an interview on the porch of his modest home, as a herd of goats wandered by. The families had felt ill-treated by local upper-caste Hindus, he said. “Nobody told us to convert; it was our desire to be treated with respect,” he added.....

From illegal detentions to wrong convictions, India’s terror prosecution is in dire need of attitudinal overhaul. Only those condemned to await their own deaths will know what it is to be suddenly blessed with the elixir of life. On November 22, two Kashmiri men found themselves lifted out of the darkness of their death row cells into light, life and liberty after the Delhi High Court set aside their convictions....

In a time when the press was being openly gagged and harassed, Cowasjee was one of the first Pakistanis to invent and articulate a way that has now become a common device used by liberals and secularists to critique political Islam in Pakistan. For example, during one such TV show when asked what he thought about Pakistan’s status of being a nuclear power, he smirked, pressed mischievously upon his walking stick, and said: ‘Sala iss qaum sey guttur to bundh hota nahi, bum kya chalaye ga …’...

After bombing Gaza, Israel is more isolated, Hamas has emerged stronger and Egypt, which helped broker a ceasefire between the two, has returned as a major regional actor On the eighth day of the bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli government agreed to sit down with the Hamas leadership and the Egyptian government to come up with a ceasefire agreement. Hamas and Egypt had called for a ceasefire from early into the conflict, but the Israelis had refused....

Salman Khurshid, External Affairs minister of India, said India did not get any request from Pakistan, either from the government or the relatives, for handing over the body of Quassab. Thus, he was buried inside the premises of the jail. As a Pakistani, I can say that we were pained by the Mumbai attacks, but were, equally, intrigued by the perpetrators of the attacks. Who were the attackers? What were their motivations? How did they end up in Mumbai?...

Quassab, the world came to call him, “the butcher”: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. Extinguishing Quassab’s life does not change the fact that there are thousands of young men just like him — which makes understanding his story that much more important....

No one knows what Quassab’s father, mother and siblings are going through today. They were moved out of Faridkot soon after his capture, and their whereabouts are not known — perhaps they are bitter; maybe they are relieved. We know from his statement that his mother had tried to stop him when she saw him last. It is also possible that Quassab’s mother might have heaved a sigh of relief realising that in death her son has been delivered from the agony of being in custody of the enemy and being tortured….

Ajmal Qassab was an enigma back in November 2008. Was this superman terrorist, dressed in combat trousers and a T-shirt, wielding a machine gun like a veteran commando, really a poor Pakistani villager? The idea that he was part of an elite squad of terrorists who had gone from Pakistan, by boat, and caused so much carnage in India, was met in Pakistan with public and official disbelief and blanket denial. Even to a journalist, the story seemed like a fantasy....

Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, 25, the only terrorist caught alive during the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, was hanged at Pune's Yerwada Jail at 7:30 this morning, in a swift and secret execution.  Doctors confirmed that he was dead. CNN IBN quoting a Pakistani press source as saying, “We respect judicial process in India. We have everything is done under proper scrutiny. Our understanding says President has jumped the queue in rejecting the mercy petition of Ajmal Kasab and till last minute it was under wraps....

That Pakistan is afflicted with the evils of bigotry and prejudice is no secret. But however much one gets accustomed — sadly, even immune — to this state of affairs, one is still left aghast at the extremely narrow worldview held by certain quarters. Another argument offered is that Singh was essentially an Indian hero, not a Pakistani one, and that there are many who have served Pakistan diligently over the years and are perhaps, more deserving of such an honour....

We have reasons to be grateful that Bal K. Thackeray has died, a normal, natural death. Several of those whom he admired, didn’t. Adolf Hitler, the fellow ‘artist’ he often invoked, killed himself, his mistress and his dog. Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay, the mother and son firm of despots that Bal Thackeray endorsed, didn’t go gently into the night either. Sanjay Gandhi, the ‘bold young man’ whom Thackeray recognized as a fellow spirit came spiralling down in his own airplane,...

The Shiv Sena chief gave voice to a Nazi impulse in Indian politics — one that poses an ever-growing threat to our Republic “Fascism”, wrote the great Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, in a treatise Balasaheb Keshav Thackeray likely never read but demonstrated a robust grasp of through his lifetime, “has presented itself as the anti-party; has opened its gates to all applicants; has with its promise of impunity enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpourings of passions, hatreds and desires with a varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals....

Girish Karnad defended himself by saying that my conscience did not accept this and there could not have been a better occasion that this when award is being given to him. Being a Nobel awardee Naipaul does have celebrity status but that does not mean he is beyond any criticism, literary or otherwise. And as a secular activist myself I agree with Girish that iron must be struck when hot and he chose right moment to attack the views of Naipaul….

Israel’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza...

Both are part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. C Rajamohan, in an article titled, Ambassadors to Pakistan, (November 12) highlights this interesting point: "Badal's Akali Dal and the Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) are both allies of the BJP." Their embrace of Pakistan stands in contrast to the BJP's reflexive hawkishness.  Apart from the fact that their visits reveal the increasing influence of states on Indian foreign policy, both visits were fascinating for a number of reasons….

The Obama administration isn't sure, so it's moving to beef up cyber-security measures and to require companies to explain how they plan to defend against cyber-attacks. But some conservatives are accusing Obama of trying to take over the internet. "If you let the government take over some part of the internet, it's going to take over more and more,"...