Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Ambedkar on Bhagat Singh

  20 March 2016, by Anand Teltumbde

  Legendary freedom fighter and martyr Bhagat Singh’s birth centenary was observed on September 28, 2007. On the occasion of the eightyfifth anniversary of his martyrdom, we are reproducing, with due acknowledgement, the following article (published earlier in Countercurrents.org) in homage to the outstanding revolutionary hero’s abiding memory. He was executed along with Sukhdev and Rajguru in Lahore on March 23, 1931. He was and remains to this day a source of inspiration for our youth. In (…)

• Bihar Assembly Election Verdict 2015

  20 March 2016

  by Sujit Lahiry
  The verdict in the Bihar Assembly elections in 2015 has some politically significant impli-cations not only for regional politics, but also for national politics. The Grand Alliance won 178 seats — out of which JD (U) got 71 seats, RJD got 80 seats and Congress got 27 seats. Despite a high-voltage, high-octane poll campaign by the BJP, the Grand Alliance won the elections by a thumping majority and was able to secure a three-fourths majority in the Bihar Assembly. This (…)

• Why do budgets always squeeze the middle class? Why should Secrecy cover Budget Proposals?

  20 March 2016, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Indian budgets are presented on the last day of February so that Parliament and the government will have all of March to discuss and finetune it before a new financial year begins on April 1. (Another British era tradition stipulated that budgets be presented in the evening so that stock markets would be closed and adventurous traders could do no mischief. Yashwant Sinha changed that practice by presenting his budgets at noon. The skies didn’t fall.)
  There are three features (…)

• Meticulous Research to Understand India’s Revolutionary History

  20 March 2016, by Chaman Lal

  BOOK REVIEW
  A Revolutionary History of Interwar India—Violence, Image, Voice and Text by Kama Maclean; Hurst and Company, London; First edition: 2015; 342 pages; price not mentioned.
  One would be rather surprised to know the increasing interest in the study of the Bhagat Singh phenomenon in the Western academia lately, perhaps more than Indian academia taking interest in the subject!
  Not only the author of the present book, Dr Kama Maclean, who is an Australian and an Associate (…)

• An Incomplete Version

  20 March 2016, by Kuldip Nayar

  I believe that a head of state should not publish his memoirs while in office. Political parties are reluctant to criticise him because he is the constitutional head, as much theirs as that of those who elected him. Pranab Mukherjee has violated the demand of office by publishing his memoirs when he is still the President of India.
  Before reading his autobiography, I imagined that Mukherjee would explain how he was wrong in becoming Sanjay Gandhi’s Man Friday. Prime Minister Indira (…)

• Pushing Hazardous GM Food Crops— Reason Trampled, Trust Betrayed

  20 March 2016, by Bharat Dogra

  While India’s first GM crop, Bt cotton, has proved to be risky and hazardous in many ways, there was at least a saving grace that the introduction of the highly hazardous GM technology was confined so far to non-food crops. But more recently various government agencies have moved rapidly in the direction of introducing GM food crops as well. While a final decision on this is still awaited, it is clear that in various ways the path for introduction of GM food crops is being cleared. If the (…)

• Unequal exchange system — a variant of bonded labour system

  20 March 2016, by Lakshmidhar Mishra

  Article 19 (g) of the Constitution of India confers on every citizen of India the fundamental right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. By implication, it would include the right to appropriate or purchase and/or sell products, according to one’s own volition and convenience, at a rate which is considered just, fair and equitable without any element of deceit and guard, manipulation, coercion or regimentation. To the extent such transaction carried (…)

• Pirates of the Realm

  20 March 2016, by Badri Raina

  Never was a more truthful thing
  Writ than “those that have
  Shall get”; thus when pirate
  Is let loot the realm and best
  “Investigating agencies”, this
  Is done in the “national interest”.
  Just as recoveries of pittance
  Made from farmer on edge
  Of despair are also made
  In the very same “national interest”.
  If the labouring hordes who
  Make our wealth are not
  Squeezed, how may the nation
  To fat men be leased?
  Good governance cannot mean
  Justice to all; it means how (…)

• The Uncommitted Sin

  20 March 2016

  He is a guileless fellow of the seraphic land, He is a naïve lad of the rustic terrain, He is a clueless fellow of the world outside, He is a darling of his parents, He is the sole glitter of his kin;
  He is a guileless fellow of the town... He is the same naïve lad for the running city; He is an awed boy in the new ambience; Has reached with a deluge of dreams; Has found the avenue to his roaring ambitions; Is ready to embark the path of struggle, And walk relentlessly on every ruin and (…)

• 

  On Jaitley’s Claim and Charge of ‘Sedition’

  13 March 2016, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Finance Minister Arun Jailtley, speaking in his capacity as the Number Two person in the Narendra Modi Government, has made a facile claim at a conference of the BJP’s youth wing that the party, or to be more precise, the party’s student organisation, the ABVP, had won the “ideological war” in the JNU row. One can react to this with only a derisive smile.
  Let us face the facts. The police had arrested the President of the JNU Students’ Union, Kanhaiya Kumar, on the charge of (…)