Mainstream Weekly

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  Table of Contents, Mainstream, Aug 15, 2026

  15 August

  * Targeting Muslim Protesters as Anti-Nationals | Arup Kumar Sen
  * PM Bhargava the scientist with a spine — Excerpts from his biography
  * Learning from the past of India’s forests | Dinesh C Sharma
  * Diagnoses of the Dance | Emanuel Eisenberg (1934)

• Targeting Muslim Protesters as Anti-Nationals | Arup Kumar Sen

  15 August, by Arup Kumar Sen

  Othering of Muslims is a recurring strategy pursued by Hindutva politics in contemporary India. This was manifested in the recent protests in Kolkata against police atrocities on the students/young protesters in New Delhi. It was reported in Altnews: “From the assembly to press briefings, Suvendu Adhikari repeatedly invoked communal tropes while defending the arrests made over the alleged violence during the July 24 Kolkata solidarity protest. Sixteen people arrested in the case – 15 of them (…)

• Jantar Mantar Notes —Togetherness during protests forging a bond for the future | Radhakanta Barik

  15 August, by Radhakanta Barik

  What happened to the crowd in Jantar Mantar? There were different groups from Ambedkarites to liberals and Marxists, but all lived in a small place in the rain and in a hot day and night without a fan except a hand fan. Visiting the place, one felt that there were another group sitting on dais popularly known as CJP leaders and in the evening, Sonam, while on hunger strike, gave a small talk for ten minutes, where he praised Modi, which disappointed me, but for his sacrifice as a hunger (…)

• District In-Charge Ministers and the Contradictions of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala: A Critical Examination | Jos Chathukulam & A. M. Jose

  15 August, by A. M. Jose, Jos Chathukulam

  Abstract
  Kerala has long been celebrated as one of the most advanced experiments in democratic decentralization in India. The state’s decentralization reforms, particularly following the implementation of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments and the People’s Plan Campaign of 1996, transferred substantial functions, funds, and functionaries to Local Self-Government Institutions (LSGIs). District Panchayats, Block Panchayats, Gram Panchayats, Municipalities and District Planning (…)

• Development Without Justice: Hasdeo Arand and the Continuing Marginalization of India’s Adivasis | Anirban Mukherjee

  15 August

  I
  Introduction: The Hasdeo Arand Conflict in Context
  India’s constitutional democracy recognizes Adivasi or tribal communities as distinct social formations having special rights over land and forests. Ironically, some of the country’s richest tribal landscapes continue to be viewed as repositories of mineral wealth. Whenever coal, bauxite, iron ore, or other natural resources are discovered beneath forests inhabited by Scheduled Tribes, the language of development takes precedence over (…)

• The struggle between the Fourth International and the bureaucratic caste from the perspective of the 21st century

  15 August

  by Sindhunil Barman Roy
  I. Introduction: The Phantom in the Totalitarian Apparatus
  When Leon Trotsky formulated his criticism of the Soviet state in the 1930s, he was dealing with a political phenomenon that was not foreseen by standard Marxist theory. The Soviet Union had not gone back to capitalism, but it was clearly not a workers’ democracy. Instead, it had been taken over by what Trotsky called a bureaucratic caste, a parasitic layer of administrators, planners, and party (…)

• The Weaponisation of Supply Chains: Lessons for India | Anusreeta Dutta

  15 August

  The first principle of the global economy was simple: economic interdependence would reduce violence. As countries became more integrated through trade, manufacturing and technology, supply chains were meant to provide stability, not competition. That assumption is increasingly falling apart at the seams. Today, supply chains are weapons of geopolitical competition, and strategic considerations, not market efficiency, determine access to critical technology, critical minerals, energy (…)

• When Jyoti Basu Addressed an RSS-Backed Forum: Revisiting a Forgotten Encounter | Sufal Bepari

  15 August

  Headlines of the two-part report on Jyoti Basu’s lecture published in Swastika on 25 July and 1 August 1977.
  With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, Hindu nationalists’ long-cherished dream of winning over Bengal has finally materialised. Significant in many ways, this political development will undoubtedly invite rigorous scrutiny and, in attempting to make sense of it, looking back at the past remains indispensable. As Jawaharlal Nehru (…)

• Film Review: Sutlej —scattered notes | Chaman Lal

  15 August, by Chaman Lal

  Satluj is a 2026 film in Punjabi directed by Honey Trehan and starring Diljit Dosanjh
  It is a story based on events in in Punjab in 1995; that was its first title also! Strangely, I was living close to the events while teaching in Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and staying with my journalist friend, the late Harbir Singh Bhanwar. Every evening on return from the University, we would talk days events. The GNDU library has on its staff literary friend, the late Punjabi poet Sheharyaar, (…)

• Tamils seek Europe’s Help as War Crime Haunts Sri Lanka | M.R. Narayan Swamy

  15 August, by M R Narayan Swamy

  In a country where thousands of Tamils were killed in the war against the Tamil Tigers, the horrific rape and murder of a school student way back in 1986 is still haunting Sri Lanka. Now, it threatens to pit liberal Europe against Colombo. Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was sexually assaulted and done to death by soldiers in Jaffna at a time when Sri Lanka was waging what looked like an unwinnable war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
  When her mother and brother, worried where (…)