Stories written by Sujoy Dhar
One of IPS’s regular India-based writers for many years, Sujoy Dhar is an India correspondent with the Washington Times. He is the founder-editor of news agency India Blooms News Service and feature service Trans World Features, a columnist with Pakistan's Newsline magazine and a correspondent for PAN in Afghanistan. Sujoy also writes for a host of other Indian and international publications.
| Web
After India's agriculture minister Sharad Pawar was slapped by a young Sikh man at a function in New Delhi, to record his protest against corruption in high places, social media sites went viral with musical spoofs and caricatured images of the incident.
In the eastern city Kolkata, a tourist just back from a holiday in India’s Andaman islands last week boasts he threw bananas to Jarawa tribe members and secretly photographed them when their car passed through a jungle.
This small town, barely 150 km away from the bustling eastern metropolis of Kolkata, hit news headlines in December 2008 when adivasis (indigenous people) led by Maoist rebels briefly captured it.
India’s sport stars have joined the survivors of the 1984 gas leak tragedy in this city, capital of the central Madhya Pradesh state, to protest against a sponsorship deal between Dow Chemical and the organisers of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer.
Ajay Shrivastav from Bhopal, the central Indian city that witnessed one of the worst industrial disasters of the world in 1984 from a deadly gas leak, is an angry man seeking justice.
In his Independence Day address to the nation on Aug. 15 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed to fight corruption, but nationwide agitations since then demanding an effective ombudsman to check graft showed an unconvinced public.
Thirteen-year-old Jamal is a Bangladeshi bootlegger who carries goods from Haridaspur town in the Indian state of West Bengal to the border district of Jessore in southwest Bangladesh, playing cat-and-mouse with Indian frontier guards every day.
Fourteen-year-old Satikanta Sahu loves going to school, but these days, he would rather spend his time manning the barricade and facing down policemen in the sandy coastal village of Govindpur in India’s eastern state of Orissa.
More than a decade ago, when India’s first lesbian-themed film - ‘Fire’ by Deepa Mehta - was released, it was booed and met with protest and vandalism, forcing many fear-stricken theatre owners to take the film off their screens.
In a secluded hospital bed in this bustling Indian metropolis, a woman who has lain brain dead for 37 years after a brutal sexual assault is at the centre of a national debate on mercy killing.
When it comes to sports, India has always cheered for Brazil in soccer. Now come another three cheers, this time for South Africa in cricket. The reason: a South African named Gary Kirsten who coached India to win the Cricket World Cup this year, for the first time in 28 years.
The cheapest car in the world proved the costliest for a 34-year-old Left Front CPI-M government in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as the communists lost the elections here by a wide margin.
Members of the united opposition here say the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces a crisis of credibility and are calling for drastic action amid charges of corruption.
On a winter evening this January, Amarnath Pandey was returning home through a low-lit alley of a suburban town in India’s heartland state Uttar Pradesh when a motorcycle-riding gunman suddenly appeared and fired at him.
In the Himalayan Mountains of eastern India’s Darjeeling locals are coping with the economic fallout of tourists cancelling their holiday plans in the area.
With three small children to raise in a dirt-poor village in eastern India’s Bihar state, farm labourer Renu Devi is an unsung rural supermom who shuttles between home and field every day.
Instances of ‘honour killings’ in Indian communities still steeped in traditional beliefs continue unabated. Yet the government has not enacted tougher laws that will deal a decisive blow against this societal scourge.
The sight of armoured vehicles and soldiers in battle gear out in Kashmir’s streets in July is a grim warning of a storm gathering yet again over the restive valley.