Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Was Pakistan testing Modi? ISI’s Foolishness subverts Collective Progress awaiting South Asia

  24 October 2014

  IMPRESSIONS
  Suddenly reality is catching up with Narendra Modi and India. We are learning that showmanship can go thus far and no further. The first hint came when the Chinese President’s visit coincided with stepped-up Chinese incursions in Ladakh. The message was that China’s Big Brother posture in Asia was not negotiable and all the Ahmedabad hoopla was just hoopla. Then, so soon after the Pakistani Prime Minister’s attendance at Modi’s swearing-in, a war-like crisis developed along the (…)

• General Elections 2014 and the Changing Political Equation in Bengal

  24 October 2014

  by Nirupam Hazra
  The 2014 election results in the State of West Bengal clearly show the dominance of the ruling Trinamul Congress as it has won thirtyfour out of fortytwo seats. Its main Opposition, the Left Front, is reduced to only two seats while the Congress and BJP managed to get only four and two seats respectively. But a deeper analysis of the result points towards a changing power equation in the political landscape of Bengal.
  The electoral battle in Bengal has been mostly a (…)

• Parliamentary Elections and Gorkhaland: Message from Darjeeling

  24 October 2014, by Swatahsiddha Sarkar

  The exposure of the Darjeeling hills towards the tit-bits of electoral politics can be traced back to 1937, the year when the first-ever elections in the hills took place. According to the provisions of the Government of India Act 1935, the Darjeeling hill region was declared as a ‘partially excluded area’ and allotted one member to be elected to the Provincial Legislature of the then Bengal. Again in 1946 the political enthusiasm registered by the people and hill leaders regarding the (…)

• Education Perspective

  24 October 2014

  by Sadhan Mukherjee
  Have our students stopped dreaming or thinking big? Don’t they feel that in the rapidly advancing modern world they have no place near the top? Conversely, why are we not trying to educate them for the future, their own and that of the country? Will the new dispensation in the governance of the country now push the country back to the gurukul tradition or advance with modern, need-based education? These are not rhetorical issues but comprise a serious inquiry.
  In the (…)

• Towards a New Education Policy

  24 October 2014

  by Murzban Jal
  All educational work in the field in the Soviet Republic of Workers and Peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the overthrow of the bourgeois, the abolition of all classes, and the elimination of all forms of exploitation of man by man. V.I. Lenin (…)

• Welcome Decision, Disconcerting Incidents

  20 October 2014, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Last week a fervent appeal was made in these columns to de-escalate the rising tensions along the India-Pakistan border.
  The ceasefire violations and firing on the LoC and international border in J&K have gradually declined although these can again recur with serious consequences in the days ahead.
  However, what is of utmost significance is that last Friday (October 10) the Nobel Peace Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 to Kailash Satyarthi of India (…)

• Notes on the Leader

  20 October 2014, by Mukul Dube

  Since the results of the general election were declared, I have been in a state of unbelief. The country now has at its head a man who has widely been called a mass murderer, who likened a massacre of Muslim citizens to the accidental death of a “kutte ka bachcha”, who delights in preening for the cameras holding swords and wearing diverse kinds of head-gear, and whose stated qualification for the top job is a thorax whose circumference is 142 centimetres.
  Modi may well be described as a (…)

• Preeti Banerjee: The Melodious Voice that first sang ‘Sare Jahanse Achchha’

  20 October 2014, by Sankar Ray

  TRIBUTE
  Preeti Banerjee (nee Sarkar) bade adieu to the mundane world on August 25 at 91. She was perhaps the last living member of the central squad of the Indian People’s Theatre Assocation (IPTA), the mass front of culture of the Communist Party of India. Her golden voice and the famous song Sare Jahanse Achchha, a household song in the late 1940s, were one as Pandit Ravi Shankar set the lyric of the famous poem of Mohammad Iqbal (written in 1904) into a song at the instance of the (…)

• Need to Review and Reverse the Decision on Planning Commission

  20 October 2014, by Bharat Dogra

  “The very first thing that our future National Government will have to do would be to set up a commission for drawing up a comprehensive plan of reconstruction.”
  —Subhash Bose’s Presidential Address at Haripura Congress (February 19, 1938)
  One of the most important strengths of any democracy is the ability to recognise serious mistakes at the right time and to take corrective action before it is too late. It is of crucial importance that India’s democracy should be able to pass this test (…)

• We will Not Allow our Respective Faiths to be Used as Instruments of Violence

  20 October 2014

  by B.P. Singh
  The following is the text of an address by the author at the World Summit 2014 organised by the Universal Peace Foundation (Seoul, South Korea, August 10-12, 2014).
  Thank you, Mr President Walsh, for inviting me to speak before this august World Summit so imaginatively organised by the World Peace Federation. I am particularly impressed by the theme of the Summit: Peace, Security and Human Development. This is a subject dear to my professional experience as well as to the (…)