Mainstream Weekly

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• Nikhil Babu Widened My Mental Horizon

  29 June 2015, by Girish Mishra

  It was in late 1959 that I met N.C. (Nikhil Chakravartty). I was sent by Comrade P. C. Joshi to deliver some document to him. At that time he had just started IPA (India Press Agency) and used to sit in the INS Building on Rafi Marg. When I met him, he expressed a great deal of warmth and asked me to meet him off and on. At that time I lived in North Avenue. My meetings with him began and I learnt a great deal from him. My mental horizon was widened. Whenever I came from Patna to Delhi, I (…)

• Nikhil Chakravartty, Our Contemporary

  29 June 2015

  by Nirupam Sen
  This month is Nikhi Chakravartty’s death anniversary. I have known very few journalists (perhaps my personal, idiosyncratic application of Lenin’s dictum: “Better fewer, but better”). Nikhil Chakravartty was among these few. I discussed some domestic and foreign policy issues with him often and, very occasionally, visited him at his Kaka Nagar flat. For me, too, the red door was intellectually welcoming, reassuring and opened to the Left. For him too, as for Robert Burns, (…)

• Nikhilda, the True Intellectual

  29 June 2015

  by Jaya Jaitly
  When a good person is no longer in our midst the feelings they leave with, and the aura of their personality remains like a soft breeze in one’s life. There are many ways in which people touch the lives of others, and as I remember Nikhil Chakravartty, I recall his intellectual purity, gentleness, and honesty in friendships. An intellectual is a loaded word and I have written at length about many current-day intellectuals as conceited and opinionated people who believe their (…)

• Praful Bidwai Is No More

  29 June 2015

  As we go to press, we have received the sad news that independent Left activist-intellectual and noted journalist Praful Bidwai, 66, has suddenly passed away on June 23 in Amsterdam where he had gone for the Transnational Institute Fellows’ Meeting (he was a Fellow there).
  For sometime in the recent past he was working on a project on the Indian Left at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. The work has been completed and the book is due soon.
  He worked in The Times of India for (…)

• Shillong: A Tale of Blue Love

  29 June 2015

  by Nabanipa Bhattacharjee
  Thousands of people forced their way into the Dimapur Central Jail—Dimapur is a fairly large, commercial town in Nagaland—on March 5, 2015 to get hold of one Syed Sarifuddin Khan, a Bangla-speaking Muslim man in his mid-thirties, in order to punish him for the alleged rape of a Naga woman. In complete disregard of the jail authority, the mob then dragged the man through the streets of the town and beat him to death. The dead Khan, then, was hung on a tower for (…)

• ‘Modigate’, BJP, Advani

  20 June 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Corruption has now raised its ugly head in the present ruling party as details of the close connections of that celebrated fugitive evading questioning by the Enforcement Directorate, Lalit Modi, with a senior member in the Narendra Modi Cabinet, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, and a noted Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, of BJP-ruled Rajasthan have come out in the open. And this has happened shortly after the Modi Government completed its one-year rule proudly claiming (…)

• Left Perspective, CPI-M and a Corrigendum

  20 June 2015

  The following is the letter from the CPI-M General Secretary to the Mainstream editor (June 15, 2015):
  Dear Mr Sumit Chakravartty,
  As the Editor of Mainstream Weekly, you had published an Editorial “Left Perspective Today” in Volume LIII (53), No. 20 on 09.05.2015 and which continues to be available at http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article5668.html. The Editorial contains an assertion which is false, baseless and malicious and is intended to defame the CPI-M as a political party in the (…)

• Report on One Year of the Modi Regime

  20 June 2015

  DOCUMENT
  Executive summary
  The following is the Executive Summary of the Report on One year of the Modi Regime, edited by John Dayal and Shabnam Hashmi. The report was released by Harsh Mander, John Dayal, Apoorvanand, Vidya Bhushan Rawat and Shabnam Hashmi at the Indian Women’s Press Corps, New Delhi on June 18, 2015. The link to the full document—“365 Days Democracy and Secularism Under The Modi Regime—A Report” [PDF]—
  [See full report here: https://tinyurl.com/olj2o4x]
  On May 26, (…)

• Food Safety Management—Conflict and Control

  20 June 2015, by Latika Nath

  States have a primary duty to raise the standard of nutrition levels in the public, improve standards of living and prohibit that which is harmful to health. Food is one of life’s basic necessities. Food laws are enacted by states to protect the consumer with reference to food quality and safety. The UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection 1985 provides a framework for all countries.
  With globalisation and commercialisation international trade has increased. In this background food quality (…)

• Was Modi’s Visit Productive?

  20 June 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Dhaka was mistimed. It looked as if he had gone to shore up the sagging image of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. He has only heightened the anti-India feeling graph. New Delhi is not seen neutral.
  I do not know why and for how long have we to support the authoritarian rule by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. True, she is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who liberated East Pakistan from the distant and oppressive West Pakistan. But that (…)