Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Bhupesh: Some Reminiscences

  4 November 2015, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  CPI leader Bhupesh Gupta’s 101st birth anniversary fell on October 20 this year. While remembering him we reproduce the following piece that N.C. wrote after his death in Moscow on August 6, 1981. it was published in Mainstream (August 22, 1981).
  To write about somebody whom one has known for more than four decades—sometimes very closely—is not easy after his or her passing away. For me, Bhupesh Gupta was one whom I have known from the early beginnings of my active (…)

• After Indira Gandhi

  4 November 2015, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Indira Gandhi’s 31st death anniversary falls on October 31 this year. On this occasion we are reproducing the following ‘Editor’s Notebook’ that N.C. wrote after her death.
  Twenty years after her great father’s passing away, Indira Gandhi fell, her frail body riddled with the assassin’s bullets, in the winter morning of October 31, 1984.
  She died as she lived—taking danger as her constant companion. And she left behind a nation not only benumbed with searing sorrow but engulfed in (…)

• India-China: Reflections on 1962 / In the Name of Ram / Bijbehara: A Challenge to Nation’s Conscience

  4 November 2015, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The following article appeared in Mainstream to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Chinese aggression (that began on October 20, 1962).
  India-China: Reflections on 1962
  This week, thirty years ago, the Chinese Army had mounted a full-scale military attack along the entire length of our northern border. For three years previous to that there were occasional clashes, accompanied by angry polemics and tension over border claims.
  What happened on October 20 was entirely different in (…)

• Dissecting Civil Conflicts in South Asia

  4 November 2015, by Bharti Chhibber

  BOOK REVIEW
  Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development edited by Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar; Sage, New Delhi; 2014; pp. 273.
  The Oxford dictionary of Politics defines civil war as a ‘military conflict centred on territory within a state, involving combatants from the state, over the political right to control that territory. Civil wars usually involve govern-ment forces and the territorial aspect of the conflict means that civilian involvement and civilian deaths are (…)

• I am a Dalit and proud to be one

  4 November 2015, by Suhas Borker

  I am a Dalit and proud to be one. You set my family on fire in my village Sunped-Faridabad You burnt alive my nine-month-old daughter, Divya, and my two-and-a-half-year-old son,Vaibhav. My twentythree-year-old wife, Rekha, is still critical in the Burns ICU.
  I am a Dalit and proud to be one. You held my fourteen-year-old brother, Govind, in Gohana-Sonipat for stealing a pigeon and got him killed in police custody. You said after the postmortem the doctors had said he died of hanging and (…)

• ’RSS leading a Systematic Campaign to Create a Hindu Rashtra’ - admiral L. Ramdas’ Letter to the president and Prime Minister

  4 November 2015

  Honourable President and Honourable Prime Minister,
  It is with a heavy heart, that I write this open letter to you at a time when our beloved country and people are facing severe challenges and threats to our shared heritage.
  I have served in the Armed Forces of India—joining soon after Independence as a 14-year- old, to end up 45 years later as the Chief of the Indian Navy [1990 to 1993]. I have witnessed many transitions in India—from the horrors of Partition in 1947 to the very (…)

• Protect Relationship of Trust between Officers and Jawans

  4 November 2015, by Bharat Dogra

  COMMUNICATION
  One of the great strengths of our Army has been the relationship of trust between officers and jawans. Therefore if this relationship of trust is threatened in any way, then the highest authorities should intervene immediately to repair this damage and restore the relationship of trust.
  It is with this wider aim that I appeal to the highest authorities in the Defence Ministry and overall in the Government of India to intervene immediately to provide justice in all cases (…)

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  The Engulfing Darkness

  24 October 2015

  POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
  As the season of festivals and lights comes, darkness has engulfed the literary and cultural spheres of the country. Growing religious intolerance and intolerance of thoughts and opinions that do not conform to the ‘ideology’ of the powers that be is forcing one litterateur after another to return the Sahitya Akademi awards as a mark of protest against the ’onslaught on freedom of expression` and ‘rising intolerance’.
  Instead of pausing and pondering over the peaceful (…)

• Will India Survive?: Reasons to believe she may

  24 October 2015, by Badri Raina

  In the past week or so, one writer after another, who has been a recipient of a state award, has been returning that award to the state in protest against the targeted mafia-style killing of a renowned dissident scholar/writer, M.M. Kalburgi, also an awardee of the Sahitya Academy. That assassination, it will be recalled, was to come after similar killings of two other prominent rationalist thinkers, Dabholkar and Pansare, all of that rather menacingly like the series of murders of (…)

• Debate on Beef

  24 October 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  India has been pushed into an unnecessary debate whether beef should be banned or not. This is a wrong question to ask in a country where the emotions of Hindus are linked with the cow, which they revere. The real question is whether a person should have been lynched on the ground that he had consumed beef. Even this allegation was based on false rumours. It looks as if the Hindu extremists have come to dictate their view of the religion.
  It is a blessing that the debate on beef did not (…)