Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Beti Bachao needs Radicalism rather than Rhetoric

  9 March 2015

  WOMEN’S WORLD
  by Neetu Choudhary
  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign on ‘beti bachao, beti padhao’ is merely a top-up on numerous scattered schemes that already exist in the name of women’s welfare or development. Though the schemes in themselves need not be questioned given the gender-insensitive country that we are, yet an introspection must not be ruled out. We must ask ourselves: ‘do we really need these schemes, which are nothing more than a mask over our inability to respond to (…)

• Beti Bachao: Patients’ Envy Doctors’ Pride

  9 March 2015

  by Harikrishnan B., Navneet Sharma and Pradeep Nair
  The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has miles to go before he sleeps, especially when he is such a slow walker. As Chief Minister of Gujarat for more than a decade, he could not reach out to Vapi which is only 200 miles away from Gandhinagar. The recent Census of India (2011) shows Vapi with the lowest sex ratio with 734 women per 1000 men. The ‘ideal’ Gujarati pride finds a pitiable 12th position in the States’ ranking list according to (…)

• Depoliticising People’s Protests

  9 March 2015, by Suranjita Ray

  The idea and practice of democracy has always remained a subject of political negotiation, revision and reinvention. Its history is inseparable from the history of people’s assertions, protests, struggles, and increased consciousness of rights and liberation. Though the nature and issues raised by people’s protests and social movements are not free from controversies and internal differences, they remain an important force of socio-economic and political transfor-mations in society. (…)

• Russia: Boris Nemtsov’s Murder and Demonisation of Putin

  9 March 2015, by Arun Mohanty

  Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia’s most flam-boyant and exotic liberal Opposition leaders and Russia’s first President Boris Yeltsin’s one-time favourite and heir-apparent, was shot dead on February 28 night at a stone’s throw from Moscow’s iconic Red Square behind the Kremlin walls. Nemtosov was returning home at midnight walking with his 23-year-old female friend, Anna Duritskaya, a model from Ukraine, after having dinner with her in a restaurant situated in the famous departmental store, GUM. (…)

• Fukuyama’s Journey since the Fall of the Berlin Wall

  9 March 2015

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Nirupam Hazra
  Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama; Publisher: Profile Books, New Delhi; 2014; price: Rs 699; pages: 658
  It is difficult to put Francis Fukuyama in a single category—a philosopher or a historian or a political thinker. In his first book, The End of History and the Last Man (an expanded version of his 1989 essay published in The National Interest), Fukuyama argued that (…)

• A Letter to Friends on a Matter of Concern

  9 March 2015, by Chaman Lal

  Dear Friends,
  Perhaps I should not address you like this, yet feeling concerned about media reports, which I wish to be proved false, about internal bickerings in the AAP, I am doing so.
  The Indian society is going through very hard times, despite the AAP’s spectacular victory in Delhi Assembly. The AAP brought some hope in fighting these hard times and reviving the spirit of the freedom struggle days against British colonialism. Today’s neo-colonial, neo-imperial system is much worse (…)

• Women’s Day

  9 March 2015, by Badri Raina

  Would it not be nice if, in fact, You did not set aside that one Charitable day to propitiate us, But simply, through the year, Internalised our human status. Would it not be nice if you Understood how, lacking us, Your brood would have no Existence, not to speak of Swagger, muscle, puissance. Would it not be nice if, in fact, You came alive to the infinite Beauty of our complimentarity, Finding fulfilment and grace In our answering disparity. Would it not be (…)

• On Modi’s Defeat in Delhi Election

  9 March 2015

  COMMUNICATION
  PM Narendra Modi’s new avatar as a high-handed, know-all self-promoting man with a tinge of arrogance was responsible for the fast deterioration of his so-called charm among electors. After all, votes like alms are is to be sought for with humility—which was missing with Modi and his team. Modi seems to have fallen into the same ‘shining India’ trap of the erstwhile flamboyant Vajpayee and is hence getting more and more distant from the real India. Voters—high or low, rich or (…)

• Actions Accentuate Alienation

  1 March 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  The Budget session of Parliament has begun with the Opposition mounting a fierce attack on the Treasury Benches on the new Land Acquisition Bill the BJP-led NDA Government has introduced in the Lok Sabha on the lines of the Ordinance on the subject the Modi dispensation had promulgated in a bid to substantially erode the major provisions of the Land Acquisition Act that came into force following the passage of the relevant legislation in both Houses of Parliament during the UPA (…)

• 8th Falgun

  1 March 2015

  a noted poem by the National Poet of today’s Bangladesh, Begum Sufia Kamal