Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Acid Test for Mulayam / Where’s the Kashmir Policy?

  28 February 2016

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Acid Test for Mulayam
  Varanasi and Kanpur are the danger signals which Mulayam Singh Yadav can hardly afford to underplay. The significant impact that was made on the Indian political scene by his victory in the December elections along with his allies, ousting the BJP in office from the key State of Uttar Pradesh, would be grievously dissipated if his government is shown up as incompetent to govern.
  The very character of the support that Mulayam Singh’s Government (…)

• Three Poems

  28 February 2016, by Badri Raina

  Women of Shingnapur Led by Trupti Desai, you marched On Shani Shingnapur as did the women Of Paris on Versaille—to level Yet another edifice of demeaning Prejudice. Knowing that it is not The mute, untouchable stone that Made you untouchable, but The proprietership of those who The gods of their making own. Wretchedly, they hide behind The ignorant rage of other women Whom they have made imbecile Mannequins on a cunning stage. However that be, know that on Republic Day of twenty sixteen, (…)

• The Space that Killed Rohith Vemula

  28 February 2016

  by Probal Dasgupta
  Does Rohith Vemula’s suicide note make charges that can serve as the basis for judicial action against individuals who drove him to his death? This question has been under intense public discussion. There have also been claims that he was not a Dalit. Those claims are easy to refute: it is verifiable that his mother Radhika, who belongs to the Mala caste (an SC community), divorced her Vaddera (OBC) husband in 1990 and brought Rohith up in a Mala neighbourhood in Guntur. (…)

• Managerial Corporate State and the Myth of Fascist Tolerance

  28 February 2016

  by Murzban Jal
  Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degra-dation, at the opposite pole. Karl Marx
  At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in (…)

• Toward India-US Military Alliance?

  28 February 2016

  by Dwijen Bose
  The BJP leaders from Prime Minister down-wards are unsparing in their criticism of the Congress. But paradoxically the NDA Govern-ment is following almost all the major policies of the UPA Government, including its economic policy of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and its foreign policy of widening and deepening India’s ‘strategic partnership` with the United States. Recently some reports have appeared in the foreign press that the NDA is engaged in (…)

• Tribute: Kewal Varma

  28 February 2016

  by Sankarshan Thakur
  Kewal Varma, the veteran journalist who led The Telegraph’s team of reporters in New Delhi through the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, passed away on January 25. He was 84.
  Kewalsaab was a guru. Kewal Varma rings wrong, he was forever and for everyone Kewal-saab. For those of us who had the fortune of apprenticing in his shade, his passing is the opening of a void that won’t be filled.
  I came to this tribe of ours callow and quite collegiate in 1984. Delhi’s Indian (…)

• Face of State Tyranny

  28 February 2016, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  State tyranny has reached campuses. This government is using every single ploy to crush any voice of dissent, to spread around an air of confusion, and to unleash terror. What happened at the JNU campus has layers to it. Foremost, it shows this government’s desperate attempt to shift focus from Rohith Vemula’s death at the Hyderabad University. It was a known fact that on February 23 hundreds of students from the different universities of the country would be reaching New Delhi to (…)

• Stop Harassment of Delhi University Professors

  28 February 2016

  We, the undersigned, condemn the ongoing harassment of senior professors of Delhi University Dr Ali Javed, Prof Nirmalangshu Mukharji and Dr Vijay Singh in the name of questioning over a seminar which is construed as an anti-national event. These professors were kept in the police station till 3 am at night and have been subjected to questioning for nearly 12 hours a day. Dr Tripta Wahi was also called for questioning on Monday (February 15) but allowed to leave in the evening.
  All this is (…)

• Things that should Never Happen in a country are Happening in India. Duty loses its Meaning

  28 February 2016, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Yaksha asked: “What is ignorance?” Yudhi-shthira replied: “Not knowing one’s duty.” That was a perfect answer in the days of Sanatana Dharma when good was good, bad was bad and all were agreed on what was duty. Sanatana Dharma is no longer practised in our country. So what is good is bad for some, what some see as duty is seen by others as abuse of duty. As a result, things that should never happen in a civilised nation—and has never happened in India before—are happening now. (…)

• Prof Randhir Singh, Teacher with a Difference

  28 February 2016

  TRIBUTE
  by Ranbir Singh
  The passing away of Prof Randhir Singh of the University of Delhi on January 31, 2016 has resulted in an irreparable lost to the discipline of Political Science. He was, indeed, a teacher with a difference in many ways.
  Firstly, he was one of those rare teachers who gave priority to the interests of their students instead of getting higher posts through research manipulating their promotions. So much so that he concentrated on teaching instead of doing Ph.D or (…)