Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Where Are We Heading?

  5 April 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  While the Aam Aadmi Party’s squabbles have snowballed with the summary expulsion of two of its founder-members—Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan—and some other leading figures in the party, like Anand Kumar and Ajit Jha, also meeting a similar fate, the organisation’s internal Lokpal Admiral L. Ramdas (Retd) too was suddenly removed from his post on March 29. In a dignified letter to the party the same evening, Admiral Ramdas wrote:
  It is with grreat surprise and sadness that (…)

• Modi Government builds Tempo for National Law Banning Conversions to Christianity

  5 April 2015, by John Dayal

  The Indian Government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national Capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s senior Ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent. Civil rights groups have recorded 168 incidents of targeted violence against the (…)

• Free Trade Faults: Europeans Fear Wave of Litigation from US Firms

  5 April 2015

  by Christoph Pauly
  With broad public resistance and a Euro-pean Parliament majority against it, EU officials are rethinking their positions on the proposed free-trade agreement with Washington. Many fear investor protection rules will wreak havoc on national laws.
  When Bernd Lange talks about the advantages of a free trade agreement with the US, he often cites the example of the VW bus. The hippy favourite has been the target of a 25 per cent tariff since 1964, a punitive move after the (…)

• Saffronisation of Secularism

  5 April 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Not many in Pakistan, still fewer in India, recalled that this March 23 marked the 75th year of the Muslim League’s resolution to demand partition of India. The Lahore resolution, as it was called, said: “That no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may (…)

• Debating a Post-Westphalian International Order

  5 April 2015

  by Jayabrata Sarkar
  Over the past three-and-a-half centuries, the principles and practices of the Westphalian Treaty (1648) gradually spread from Europe to the rest of the world. The Westphalian order assumed a vital importance for three main reasons. First, it secularised international politics by divorcing it from any particular religious footing, anchoring it instead on the tenets of national interest and reasons of state. Second, it promoted sovereignty, the legal doctrine that no (…)

• Where is the Ghar to Return when it is Unjustly Occupied?

  5 April 2015, by Ambrose Pinto

  The SCs/STs are recognised as indigenous people of the country. They constitute more than 25 per cent of the country’s population. However, at the United Nations, the Government of India had consistently denied existence or applicability of the concept of “indigenous peoples” to these groups though the country had voted in their favour at the General Assembly on September 13, 2007. India is also a signatory to the International Labour Organisation Convention concerning the Protection and (…)

• Forsaken at Home : Repertoire of Displacement

  5 April 2015

  by Shubhra Seth
  The feeling of returning home gives a sense of respite and belonging to many. But how does one feel when the home does not give a sense of belonging and it is just a mere lifeless structure that one returns to every day, for the simple reason that, what was once upon a time their home, today no longer welcomes them? The Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) live with this dilemma every day. Living in relief colonies or camps, their condition is similar to that of refugees as (…)

• Behind Barbaric Lynching in Dimapur

  5 April 2015, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Those of us who’d looked and sounded aghast at those officially conducted beheadings and killings in several countries, need to speak out at the barbaric lynching of a rape accused in Nagaland’s Dimapur. For one, every rape accused needs to defend his case; chances are that the accused was framed and with that nailed. And in this bizarre case, the accused, Farid Khan, could not have been dragged out of the prison hell-hole without the official support of the jailor /jail staff and (…)

• Kejriwal, the Aam Admi Party’s supremo, silent on Communalism — the Gravest Menace to the country

  5 April 2015

  COMMUNICATION
  It is really shocking that neither during the election campaign of Delhi Assembly elections nor on the occasion of the swearing ceremony, Mr Kejriwal, the Aam Admi Party chief, has not condemned communalism which is the gravest menace not only to Indian secular democracy but to the very existence of the country. Over and above all this he has not uttered a single word against the RSS plan of converting India into a Hindi country and establishing a Hindu state and the Modi (…)

• Split In The Communist Movement — A Historic Necessity Or A Blunder?

  5 April 2015

  by Tika Ram Sharma
  The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) celebrated the 50th anniversary of its foundation last year. While for the CPM the split was a matter of ‘celebration’, for others in the Left it was a disaster. There have been statements from the CPM leaders about the achievements and failures of their movement of these fifty years. According to the CPI-M, the split in the movement in India was a ‘historic necessity’. As per the ideological document of the 2012 Congress of (…)