Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Afghan Test Case

  9 May 2015, by Uttam Sen

  The Afghan President, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani’s mindfulness of India in his country’s scheme of things could well have been distilled in the interview he gave a leading Indian daily. Creating the right of way by road for goods from Kabul past the Wagah checkpost to India and beyond and vice versa to Central Asia is probably a former technocrat’s most vivid statement of intent. If and when he has his way, Afghan goods trucks will be rumbling down to Kolkata and Chittagong. The stabilisation of (…)

• Thinking Big, China is Changing the World Order; with Mixed Priorities, we can but Tag Along

  9 May 2015, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  It is now clear that China is seeking to change the way the world is run. Its two big schemes—the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road, or Belt and Road in short—are so daring and perceptive that the world is struck yet again by the long-term view of China’s strategists. Add to this the concept of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and its runaway success—and we can see China overtaking America in influence even without
  getting anywhere near its (…)

• Enormity of Nepal’s Tragedy

  2 May 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  While fears of epidemic mount in Kathmandu with many bodies yet to be removed, Nepal’s PM Sushil Koirala has said the death toll in last Saturday’s 7.9-intensity earthquake that rocked the Himalayan state with unprecedented ferocity—it was the worst such natural calamity the country experienced in 81 years—could touch 10,000 since information from the affected remote villages is yet to come. South Asia has not been witness to such a terrible human tragedy in recent times and all (…)

• Chinese Bonanza for Pakistan: In the Wider Interest?

  2 May 2015, by Uttam Sen

  China’s multifaceted initiative on Pakistan has been received pragmatically by public opinion in India on the watch for what works best. Even the windfall of submarines, as long as it is not technically converted into a platform for directing a nuclear-tipped second strike at India, has not produced knee-jerk alarm, the Defence Minister briefly spelling out a more ambitious schedule. It is now tacitly taken for granted that the various aspects of China’s policies include the Pakistani proxy (…)

• Ten Lodestars From Xi’s Pakistan Visit

  2 May 2015, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Looking at it from any angle, the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Pakistan has been an extraordinary event. To be sure, Pakistan experienced the “Midas touch”. Almost overnight, there is buzz that Pakistan is an overlooked reform story without reform valuations. And this is according to the prestigious London-based Renaissance Capital. But Xi’s visit was not exclusively business-driven, either, since whatever China touches today—even a new bank—also becomes “political”. (…)

• Why ‘May’ Day?

  2 May 2015, by Anil Rajimwale

  This year again, the world is celebrating the First of May as the May Day, a day of labour struggle, solidarity and festival. It would be interesting to learn why the month of May was chosen for the first all-American industrial strike in 1886, which led to the birth of May Day or the International Labour Day.
  The month of May has traditionally been a festive one in Western history. May was celebrated as ancient spring festival in the northern hemisphere. In ancient Rome, days in May were (…)

• Congress of the Future

  2 May 2015, by Sitaram Yechury

  At its 21st Congress, the Communist Party of India-Marxist redoubled its resolve for strengthening the Party, the class and mass organisations and unleashing powerful people’s struggles for forging the Left and Democratic Front, based on a programmatic alternative to
  the current policies being pursued by the Indian ruling classes, with the eventual aim of replacing the bourgeois-landlord class rule by the People’s Democratic Front led by the working class. This is the only way that the (…)

• Yechury and the Kerala Selfie

  2 May 2015

  by Appukuttan Vallikunnu
  The election of Sitaram Yechury as the CPM’s General Secretary without a contest is significant in one aspect. It is a small beginning of that party’s rectification process. First, a victory for those who waged an inner-party struggle against a personalised leadership in the 21st Congress of the CPI-M. A leadership based on personal whims and fancies.
  The party is in for an organisational plenum to correct its big organisational mistakes within six months. One (…)

• I give you the Bullet Train

  2 May 2015, by Badri Raina

  Are you hungry, are you in pain? Come, I’ll feed you the bullet train. Have you no roof ov’r your head? Are you directly under the rain? Come, jump into the bullet train. Are you on foot, pursued apace By rapist, moralist, policeman’s cane? Just one way to cheat them all— Ride away in the bullet train. The bullet train is quick and fast, It leaves behind the ugly things In such rapid tryst with development, You’d think they never did exist. Are you a farmer with noose in hand, (…)

• ’Opposition-mukt Bharat’ is a Dangerous Thesis. Is Yechury up to the Task of Defeating it?

  2 May 2015, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Outside of religious faith-lines, can the dead be brought to life again? The principal commu-nist grouping in India, the CPI-M, was so systematically destroyed during the Prakash Karat years that it would be difficult to imagine it becoming relevant in Indian politics again. In the larger view of things, this is unfortunate because a country as diverse as India must have a Left-Right-Centre party architecture for democracy to be meaningful. The BJP’s proclaimed policy of a (…)