Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• FDI increase in Insurance is Anti-National

  27 December 2014, by Rajindar Sachar

  The Modi Government has decided to introduce a Bill to allow increase of FDI from 26 per cent to 49 per cent in insurance. Outwardly the Congress and the other constituents of the erstwhile UPA Government are threatening to oppose it—though ironically, it was opposed by the BJP when the Congress-led UPA Government proposed it earlier. The enormity of the hypocrisy by both the major political groups hits you in the eye.
  In 1956, the Congress, to strengthen its position in the 1957 general (…)

• Indian Police

  27 December 2014

  COMMUNICATION
  All countrymen rightly condemn and resent the highly deplorable, thoroughly inefficient and corrupt Indian Police and its functioning.
  It has earned notoriety for adopting the immensely inhuman torturous three-degree methods leading to custodial death, resorting to fake encounters, production of fabricated evidence in the courts, arresting innocent Indian citizens and keeping them for months as under-trials and for taking bribes. It is full of anti- Muslim bias and (…)

• The Confidentiality Clause And Fighting Black Money At Home

  27 December 2014

  by Pranjit Agarwala
  The confidentiality clause in the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAA) does prevent the Government of India from making public the identity of account holders without prima-facie evidence of wrong-doing. It, however, does not put restrictions on providing the relevant information to a court during legal proceedings or to an administrative body concerned with the matter. Nor does it restrain the Government of India from cracking down on black money within the country. (…)

• Foreign Currency Derivatives — A Sophisticated Loot?

  27 December 2014

  by Vahidha Nizam
  A sophisticated loot of more than one lakh crores of rupees through ‘foreign currency derivatives’, is alleged to have been aided and abetted by the Indian banks. Under the garb of a benign taxonomy ‘foreign currency derivatives’ Indian corporate and SMEs have been subjected to phenomenal losses that would add upto more than one lakh crore rupees. SBI and 18 other Indian private and foreign banks in India have allegedly acted as the obsequious agents of the foreign (…)

• Dimensions of Progressive Politics: The Indian Context

  27 December 2014

  by T.K. Oommen
  What is reckoned as ‘progressive’ depends on the benchmark from which we start and the combination of factors which we take into account. The 20th century witnessed three models: (1) Capitalism, multi-party democracy and nation-state. (2) Socialism, one-party system and multi-national state. (3) Regulated or limited capitalism drawn from the second model and multi-party democracy from the first model and national state usually referred to as the third way adopted by India. (…)

• India’s Foreign Trade Deficit, Rupee Slide and the Fraud of Modern Economics

  27 December 2014, by B P Mathur

  The intense pressure being applied on India to sign the WTO’s trade facilitation agreement, sidetracking India’s legitimate concern of food security, shows the hard reality of international economic relations. Indian policy-makers fail to realise that behind the sophistry of international diplomacy, the Western countries are vigorously pursuing their agenda of finding markets for their products to give a boost to their stagnating economies. Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas C Schelling (…)

• Gandhi’s Champaran Struggle

  27 December 2014, by Girish Mishra

  Two epoch-making events took place in 1917. The first was the Bolshevik Revolution in November that ended the Czarist rule over Russia and heralded the dawn of socialism in the world. The second event that did not immediately appear very important to people outside its locale proved to be the beginning of the end of foreign rule over India and sounded the death-knell of British imperialism. It took place in Champaran, a district of Bihar, about which not much was then known in other parts of (…)

• Imaging the Hindu Rashtra

  27 December 2014, by A K Biswas

  Part-I
  Equality, Human Dignity victim of Hindu Rashtra
  “Know that a Brahmana of ten years and Kshatriya of a hundred years stand to each other in the relation of father and son; but between those two the Brahmana is the father.”1 —Manu, Ch. II. 135
  The spectre of a Hindu Rashtra is before Indians in full bloom. Its protagonists, active since long, have captured the public domain. India is likely to enter the ancient era when the 100-year-old Kshatriya kowtowed before a 10-year child (…)

• Incisive Analysis of India’s ‘Skewed’ Rise in Contemporary Times

  27 December 2014

  by Nirupam Sen
  REVIEW ARTICLE
  Indians in a Globalising World: Their Skewed Rise by Dilip Hiro; Harper Collins India; 2014; pages: 375; price: Rs 699.
  Indians in a Globalising World ranks with the best of Dilip Hiro’s books and with the best of books written on India in recent times. The reader is carried along the absorbing flow of research and reporting, facts and events, narrative and analysis with no essential detail or statistic missing, but never weighed down by these— a bright (…)

• Yugoslavia — What Happened To It? Can It Re-emerge? : Interview with Branislav Gosovic

  27 December 2014

  (Branislav Gosovic, who holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is a retired UN career official. From 1991 to 2005, he was in charge of the Secretariat of the South Centre, an intergovernmental think-tank of developing countries. His book, The South Shaping the Global Future, Six Decades of the South-North Development Struggle in the UN, has just been published by the Transcend University Press. He was in New Delhi recently to attend a seminar on BRICS (…)