Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• AFSPA Requires Another Look

  22 November 2014, by Kuldip Nayar

  Two boys have been killed in Kashmir. The incident itself is bizarre. A white-coloured car is mistaken for a similar one which used to scurry the terrorists back and forth. As many as 115 bullets are fired on the car at one go. The only surviving passenger, a boy, tells how the incessant fury did not stop even after the car hit a tree to come to a halt.
  The Army has accepted the mistake. The agility with which it has done so indicates that the gun crazy among them was spotted immediately. (…)

• Who Wants Military for Internal Security?

  22 November 2014, by S G Vombatkere

  Parliament and Government
  The government can function in the interest of people only when there is peace and order in society, persons in power use people-oriented politics, and the rule of law is observed by all sections of society. Maintenance of security, public order, and supplies and services essential to the public, usually together termed “law and order”, is the primary task of the civil adminis-tration. [“Civil administration” is the combi-nation of the powers, roles and functions (…)

• Technology, Life, and Civilisation

  22 November 2014

  by N.V.K. Murthy
  Sometimes I wonder at the changes that science and technology have made in my own life spanning nine decades. I was brought up in a British cantonment town in colonial India. My first memory goes back to the days when we had storm lanterns that used kerosene. I remember the daily chore that my mother had of cleaning three or four such lanterns, filling them with kerosene, and lighting them at dusk. Also, at this time in India, water was mainly drawn from wells, because (…)

• If Britain is responsible for India’s Misery, why is Mass Misery Still Continuing?

  22 November 2014, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Here’s something that should rivet Narendra Modi’s attention. “Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilised world—nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty—had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods—the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and (…)

• Nehru and Minorities

  22 November 2014

  (Jawaharlal Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary was befittingly observed by a grateful nation on November 14. On this occasion we continue to publish/reproduce more articles on Nehru.)
  The following contribution from Nehru’s biographer, Dr S. Gopal, was published in Mainstream (November 12, 1988). It is based on the Ansari Memorial Lecture which he delivered at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi on February 22, 1988. It is now being reproduced here because of its relevance in the present (…)

• The Nehru Daur

  22 November 2014, by Shyam Benegal

  I remember the first time I saw Nehru.
  It was soon after the police action that liberated Hyderabad from Nizam’s rule. I must have been about 12 at the time. A friend of mine and I were walking towards a disused golf course close to my home where we often played cricket. It was early in the morning. Two horsemen came cantering along on their horses. One was General J.N. Chaudhuri who was the Military Governor of Hyderabad at the time and the second was Jawaharlal Nehru. He looked like a (…)

• Betrayal of Nehru Legacy

  22 November 2014, by C.N. Chitta Ranjan

  It is an irony of history that the name of Mahatma Gandhi should within a few years of his martyrdom serve as no more than a mascot for perpetrators and abettors of oppression and exploitation. His name has been mouthed times without number by the very persons who either in office or outside the seats of power have done their best to prevent the realisation of his ideal of social and economic equality. Under the rule of so-called Gandhians over two decades the rich have become richer and (…)

• Remembering Nehru Today

  22 November 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  The inherent strength of a nation lies in its ability to remain calm and act with coolness and courage when faced with a critical situation. That today India is able to do so when external danger and internal difficulties threaten to disrupt her security, sovereignty and stability, is because Jawaharlal Nehru was the architect of the basic essentials and inspires of the spirit which go to make such a nation.
  Remembering Nehru today on his eighty-second birth (…)

• Nehru and Socialism

  22 November 2014

  by Mohd. Yousuf Dar
  Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889 at Allahabad. He was an upholder of some of the concrete political values. He believed in socialism, secularism, democracy and the modern values of positivism. The contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru is rightly acclaimed as the maker of modern India. Having faith in the Indian people, he sought to build a democratic polity and an economically modernised nation.
  He was both a thinker as well as a political practitioner. He (…)

• Nehruvian Framework: Battleground of Progress and Reaction

  22 November 2014, by Anil Rajimwale

  The Nehruvian framework today has become a terrain for the historic battle between the forces of progress and those of Rightwing reaction. It has always been. We have entered a phase where the reactionary forces seek to distort the legacy of the freedom movement by usurping and destroying it. They also seek to destroy everything achieved by India after freedom as a continuation of the ideology of national liberation.
  The history of post-independence India has been fashioned around the main (…)