The return of an old mindset

If Mrs Gandhi were here today, there is much about current Indian attitudes that she would find familiar

In 1981, shortly after I had finished university, I spent a year travelling through the US and the UK to work on a special project. My intention was to investigate the proposition — taken for granted by nearly every Indian I knew — that the foreign press was biased against us. This was a view that my parents had held, even when they lived in England, and though it had been a decade since my father had died, his contemporaries still stuck to it.

I knew what they meant. Brought up to believe that the West did not want India to