“I’m going to waste my vote,” a friend told me recently. “And don’t argue with me,” he added. “It’s my right to do so.” I defied him. Regrettably, even though I also recruited help nearby to press home my point, my unsolicited advice fell on deaf ears. My friend’s mind was made up and nothing would stop him. What he intends to do, according to him, is to vote for a candidate in the 2023 presidential election that he knows would lose. He did not name names, though in the countdown to next year’s election, I have heard the suspect…

Last Friday, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a literary event in New York. The attack culminated the many years of harassment by religious fundamentalists over his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. When the book was published, Muslims took umbrage over its contents and demonstrated their feelings through public protests and book burnings. Several countries banned the book, Iran synthesised the rage into a Fatwa. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, head of the theocratic regime of Iran, sought a soft target after an attritional war with Iraq (and the resultant economic fallout had brewed domestic disaffection against him) and capitalised on the…