Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• The Jayalalithaa Case: A Landmark in Reform

  6 October 2014, by Uttam Sen

  The Tamil Nadu Chef Minister and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief, Ms J. Jayalalithaa’s conviction by a Special Court under the Prevention of Corruption Act in Bengaluru on September 27 was exemplary. Ms Jayalalithaa was sent to prison for four years, disqualified as an MLA, lost her position as the Chief Minister and was barred from holding public office for ten years, apart from having to pay a fine considered commensurate with the magnitude of her offence. Her three (…)

• The Game in Afghanistan

  6 October 2014, by Apratim Mukarji

  At the penultimate hour of leaving Afgha-nistan, the Western powers are now engaged in the dirtiest game imaginable. Doggedly pursuing the goal of facilitating a legitimised re-entry of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network into Afghanistan in the post-2014 scenario, the Obama Administration has put the Afghanistan Government under utmost pressure to succumb to its diktat.
  Despite repeated requests by Kabul, Washington D.C. has steadfastly refused to supply heavy artillery, tanks (…)

• Cows, Candles and the Akhand Rashtra: Being Dinanath Batra

  6 October 2014

  Commentary
  by Navneet Sharma, Harikrishnan B. and Pradeep Nair
  “Pakistan and Bangladesh are the 31st and 32nd states of India. Cow is our national animal. Swadeshi is my birthright. The Indraprastha is the Capital of the Akhand Hindu Rashtra. Hindi is our national language. ‘Ma Bharti’ is our national anthem. The national flag is of saffron colour. Hinduism is the oldest civilisation and the Nobel Prize is instituted in the name of Dinanath Batra.”
  In this commentary, we wish to (…)

• Police Encounter Guidelines: Reaffirmation of Rule Of Law

  6 October 2014

  by Sanjay Parikh
  The Supreme Court, in a petition filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), has laid down as many as 16 guidelines which have to be treated as law declared under Article 141 of the Constitution. The Order dated September 23, 2014 of the Apex Court is applauded as well as criticised.
  The occasion to lay down the guidelines arose out of a writ petition filed by the PUCL in the Bombay High Court questioning the 99 police encounters which had taken place between (…)

• The Real Reasons for Mahatma Gandhi’s Greatness

  6 October 2014, by Bharat Dogra

  Mahatma Gandhi is today widely accepted internationally as one of the most admired leaders of the 20th century with an enduring contribution to world peace. However, increasingly his legacy is being disputed by critics who raise serious questions ranging from his several questionable decisions during the freedom movement to his stand on the Dalit and gender issues (also his controversial celibacy experiments). Unfortunately some followers of Gandhiji entirely ignore the voices of criticism. (…)

• Editors Guild Condemns Attack on Rajdeep Sardesai

  6 October 2014

  The Editors Guild on September 29 strongly condemned the attack on senior journalist and its former President, Rajdeep Sardesai, by a group claiming to be supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
  Sardesai—who, according to eyewitness accounts, kept trying to pacify a crowd of around 60 people—was “abused in the vilest language”, and manhandled at the Madison Square Garden in New York. “This mob mentality to silence those with divergent views is not acceptable,” the Guild said and uged (…)

• Empire Talks Back

  6 October 2014, by Badri Raina

  Go back a thousand years or so,
  And you will find a golden bird;
  She chirps aloft the Himalayas,
  And spreads her wing so wide
  That a nation forms from head
  To foot, and from side to side,
  Drawn with streaks of molten gold
  And rivers of golden tide.
  There the radiant Brahmin rehearses
  His uncanny yogic stroke,
  Connecting by Vedic mantra
  The earth with swarg-lok.
  Alas, but nothing he could do
  Held back the marauders;
  They rampaged down each golden
  Town, and (…)

• Inevitability of Gandhian Village Reconstruction in Rural India

  6 October 2014

  by G. Gangadhara Rao
  Introduction
  Many thinkers doubt the economic ideology of Gandhi, since they believe that it is not a suitable method either as a policy or as an approach. But gradually this way of thinking has been changing across the world. Kazuya Ishii says: “Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts seem to be attracting more and more attention nowadays, as the domination among nations and the destruction of the environment are globally questioned.” (Kazuya Ishii, p. 297, 2001) There has been (…)

• Missing the Woods for the Trees: Gandhiji and Arundhati Roy’s Polemic

  6 October 2014

  by Suresh Jnaneswaran
  The controversy of Ms Arundhati Roy’s Mahatma Ayyankali address at Thiruvanantha-puram refuses to subside. It has assumed a momentum of its own and moving around the globe on its own volition. The socio-political issues raised by Arundhati Roy have agitated the country in the past and has assumed turbulent proportions in the present especially in the context of religious terrorism and Maoism breathing down our necks. Instead of deliberating on the core issues raised (…)

• Gandhi, Ayyankali and Arundhati Roy

  6 October 2014

  by Sukumaran C.V.
  Delivering the Mahatma Ayyankali address at an international seminar on “Re-imagining Struggles at the Margins: A History of the Unconquered and the Oppressed” organised by the Mahatma Ayyankali Chair, Department of History, University of Kerala, Arundhati Roy told that ‘it is time to unveil a few truths about a person whose doctrine of non-violence was based on the acceptance of a most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system’. The ‘person’ she referred to is (…)