The New Republic

Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire By C. A. Bayly (Cambridge University Press, 383 pp., $29.99) Democracy and Its Institutions  By André Béteille (Oxford University Press India, 228 pp., £27.50) I. READ MORE >>

Last month, a little-known British historian named Andrew Robert swas swept into the White House for a three-hour-long hug. He lunched with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, huddled alone with the president in the Oval Office, and was rapturously lauded by him as"great." Roberts was so fawned over that his wife, Susan Gilchrist,told the London Observer, "I thought I had a crush on him, but it's nothing like the crush President Bush has on him." READ MORE >>

A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust by David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff (The New Press, 269 pp., $26.95) READ MORE >>

Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank (Houghton Mifflin, 448 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>

History will say, when it records contemporary events in India, that destiny fulfilled itself with  punctual and implacable logic. The new Constitution has just come into operation, and already over the greater part of the Peninsula it is a dead letter. The nation refuses to work it. What else could one expect? The British government prepared the mind of this people to receive its gift by two years of intensive coercion. It would discuss the details of the new settlement only with hand-picked delegates of its own choosing. READ MORE >>