Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Left Unity Badly Needed to Counter Increasing Onslaughts on Livelihoods and Ecology

  13 June 2015, by Bharat Dogra

  All the rallies and media hype to glorify the one year of the Modi regime cannot hide the bitter truth about the growing seriousness of the country’s problems and the directionless, unplanned, corporate-led growth likely to devastate environment and livelihoods based on jal, jangal, zameen (land, water and forests). In this context clearly there is an ever-growing need for Left unity. However, this unity will be able to serve the people and nation only if it is based on reappraisal of past (…)

• US Policy to Destabilise Turkmenistan and India’s Regional Interests

  13 June 2015

  by Hasan Hamidullah
  Destabilisation of Turkmenistan’s security is in the interests of three major players in the region—the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Even if those countries have their own goals independent of how those goals would affect India’s interests (except in the case of Pakistan), their policies, amalgamated into a unified policy-perspective, can ruin the idea of sustainable supplies of energy resources to India from the Central Asian states and additionally prevent New (…)

• Disturbing Developments

  6 June 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Twenty soldiers were killed and over a dozen sustained injuries in a clinically executed ambush in Manipur’s Chandel district last morning (June 4). This was the deadliest terror attack on Army personnel in the last 33 years in the region. A new outfit, the United Liberation Front of Western South-East Asia, is learnt to have claimed responsibility for the attack.
  With this ambush by the militants, the spotlight has returned on violence in the North-East. According to PM (…)

• Modi’s Date with Dhaka

  6 June 2015, by Muchkund Dubey

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keeping up his hectic schedule of undertaking official visits to foreign countries in pursuit of India’s interests in its bilateral relationship with these countries. This time, he is embarking upon a journey to Bangladesh from June 5 to 7, 2015. Going by the stakes involved in our relations with this country, Bangladesh should have been his first port of call. Among the South Asian countries we have had very close relations with Bangladesh even in the midst (…)

• Modi’s Assurances and Reality of Ballabhgarh

  6 June 2015, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Couldn’t be a better managed stage-show. The BJP’s Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi collects a dozen so-called ‘Muslim leaders’, makes them sit around Prime Minister Modi, and then starts off the highlight of this show—these men coming up with supposedly well-rehearsed lines and the Prime Minister giving those politically apt assurances!
  Even the naïve will find it impossible to believe these assurances. Meaningless they sound in the heap of the backgrounders. No, not just in the backdrop of (…)

• Caste in British General Elections 2015? What Rubbish!

  6 June 2015, by A K Biswas

  Part-I
  Bogey of Religious Persecution
  drove Voters of British Hindus to Conservative Fold
  An English daily, published from many world capitals, broke the news with an unbelievable headline: “UK Election: Hindu Group Urges Support For Tories Over Caste Legislation, Sparks Controversy”.1 It said: “The Hindu caste system has emerged as a political issue in the final days leading up to the UK election Thursday, after a British Hindu group published a letter urging its supporters to vote (…)

• Major Development Challenges facing the Telangana State

  6 June 2015, by C.H. Hanumantha Rao

  It is a privilege for me to get this opportunity for meeting and interacting with the first elected representatives of the Telangana State. After its creation as a separate State, Telangana is better placed in several respects. It has the usual advantages of viability of a smaller State in terms of area and population as well as relative homogeneity of its history and culture. There is a predominance of weaker sections in the State—BCs, SCs, STs, and minorities together constituting nearly (…)

• Modi’s Non-rule

  6 June 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Information Minister Arun Jaitley is inviting editors from different parts of India to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to underline the achievements of his of first-year rule. This public relations exercise is nothing new because all his predecessors have done so.
  India’s icon, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not have to do so. Still, when India was licked at the hands of China in 1962, Nehru met editors to explain the debacle. Lal Bahadur Shastri had so much goodwill that he did not have to (…)

• Reality and Illusion

  6 June 2015, by Rajindar Sachar

  Last year, when the BJP with Modi as the Prime Minister romped home with an overwhelming majority of its own, people thought that for the next few years this government was untouchable and any mass discontent would be just wished away. Any such self-conceit amongst the BJP loyalists now lies shattered on the roads of towns and the fields of villages.
  The reasons are not far to seek. An old adage—that you can fool all the people for some time and some people for all the time but you cannot (…)

• Modi in the Gobi Desert

  6 June 2015, by M K Bhadrakumar

  A high-level visit is always best assessed the morning after. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Mongolia offers a keyhole to take a peep at his visit to China (from where he headed for Ulanbator). Modi said immediately after arrival in Ulanbator (from Shanghai) that he could experience “true friendship”. We now have a fair idea what he’d missed from May 14-16 in China—“true friendship”.
  The highlights of Modi’s visit to Mongolia are three: a) decision that the two countries would (…)