June 2009

I was Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant’s Press Secretary when I saw E.M.S. Namboodiripad for the first time at the meeting of State Chief Ministers. He looked different from the rest. He wore a coloured bush shirt while they donned white khadi kurtas; they left him alone when they exchanged small talk between themselves.
The agenda before the Chief Ministers was about the extension of Preventive Detention Act, a British measure which was used to pick up leaders to stall any movement (…)

Marxism, as is well-known, does not see ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ as two separate entities. The journey from the abstract to the concrete, from ‘theory’ to ‘praxis’ is as much a theoretical effort as an effort of praxis. E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s theoretical greatness therefore lay in the fact that he developed this theory-praxis totality in the context of rthe reality of the Indian society. And one very significant feature of this reality that he had to grapple with was that India was a planned (…)

The literature review shows that poverty definitions currently used by various countries (especially developing) for administering their poverty programmes are inadequate, because very little research has been done in this area.
In fact, it is not easy to have one uniform definition of poverty because there are a number of specific issues that are normally linked with poverty. These are:
• the historical definitions of poverty;
• the use of index numbers in the (…)

This month marked the twentyfifth anniversary of ‘Operation Bluestar’ that culminated in the liquidation of Jarnail Singh Bhindarwale in Amritsar’s Golden Temple but eventually led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi on the last day of October the same year. On this occasion we reproduce N.C.’s first reactions to the event in the ‘Editor’s Notebook’ of Mainstream (June 9, 1984).
It is a sad commentary on the state of our Republic that the Army had to go in for a military operation to (…)

Women’s World
The recently generated turbulence in the global economy has not only drawn attention to various forms of distress, but also generated a flood of introspection on economic reasoning, and a flood of ideas on other ways of generating prosperity or, to put it in classical terms, building the wealth of nations.
In this review what would be attempted is
(1) to reveal, through a gathering of currently available literature, that there is clear difference between impact of (…)

Book Review
Workers Politics, the Ethics of Socialism by William Ash; Bread Books, Coventry, UK; 2007; pp. 340.
This is a remarkable book by a remarkable author! William Ash is an acclaimed novelist, script editor, journalist and writer, decorated war hero, leading trade unionist and thinker! The publication of the book, a British reprint of an earlier book published in India in 1998 with a different title, coincided with the 90th birthday of the distinguished author. The book is a (…)

Several noted personalities, some of them friends and associates of Mainstream, have left us in the last few months. We pay our sincere, though belated, homage to their abiding memory.
On November 9, 2008 passed away in New Delhi Mahendra Acharya, 90, who functioned as the CPI Parliamentary Party’s Office Secretary till 1996. A totally unassuming dedicated revolutionary, he joined the party in the central office staff when P.C. Joshi was its dynamic General Secretary. He worked in the (…)

The last seven days have been witness to two striking events.
President Barack Obama‘s historic and landmark speech in Cairo on June 4 through which he sought to reach out to the Islamic world was indeed refreshingly new from the side of the United States and marked, at least in the sphere of rhetoric and at the conceptual level, a radical departure from George W. Bush’s prenicious course in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The contentious issues he dwelt in his speech included the (…)

The world is never static. It is ever dynamic. Obama is the new avatar for transformation of a new unitive world order inspired by a spiritual-material comity of humanity rid of the pathology of theological obscurantism and terrorist inhumanity. Not nuclear holocaust nor belligerent supremacy but a new beginning inaugurated by Obama in his historic appeal in Cairo for global peace and friendship between Asia and America led by Obama who is no longer a person but an institution, an ideology (…)

Era Sezhiyan, a former Member of Parliament, has brought to light the documents relating to India’s co-sponsoring and supporting the Sri Lankan resolution to the UN Human Rights Council on May 27, 2009, commending the acts of the Sri Lanka. Below is given a summary of the relevant portions of his appeal and the note to Members of Parliament and the scanned copies of the Human Rights Council’s documents relating to India being a co-sponsor and voting in support of the Resolution of Sri Lanka. (…)