Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Money-Muscle Power in Student Union Elections and National Politics

  22 September 2014

  by Kamal Kumar and Alisha Dhingra
  Student politics is seen as one of the interesting and lively aspects of the student’s campus-life, something which leverage and shape her/his future personality as well as political under-standing. The model of student politics in India has been encouraged to spread the ethos of democracy among the youth and to stimulate them to actively partake in national politics. From India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the former Indian President and (…)

• Tribute to Saifuddin Choudhury

  22 September 2014

  reproduced also is an Interview with Saifuddin Choudhury from 2000

• Voters Realise Dangers of Communal Politics

  22 September 2014, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Finally, the people of this country have woken up! The by-poll results are enough to show that we, as an electorate, have matured and can see, rather foresee, the dangers of communal politics. We don’t want to be divided and ruined by communally charged politicians. We want to exist in peace and earn our daily bread without the politicians grabbing those morsels.
  Enough of hate politics! Enough of communal propaganda! Enough of poison unleashed! It’s a combination of all this (…)

• Positive Signs amid Persisting Negative Features

  13 September 2014, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  It is a welcome sign indeed that politics has taken a back-seat while confronting nature’s fury in Kashmir. As floods ravage and cause havoc in large parts of the Valley including the capital Srinagar taking quite a toll of lives and numerous citizens are still stranded across the State, the armed forces and Air Force alongwith the National Disaster Response Force have mounted rescue efforts braving all odds with the nation united behind them to meet the challenge of the (…)

• India, Japan at the Global Crossroads

  13 September 2014, by Uttam Sen

  Key diplomatic exchanges or matters of state are almost axiomatically obscured from the world. Reportage does not necessarily sharpen our flair for analysis or speculation. Yet it could provide the ineluctable reality, as much as the grist for a searching hypothesis. In that tentative vein, has Narendra Modi’s reported bonding with Shinzo Abe opened up a worldview that others have either not grasped, or are no longer inclined to dare, particularly when it is more immediately utilitarian than (…)

• Why Japan Matters for India

  13 September 2014

  by Ramakrushna Pradhan
  Undoubtedly, India and Japan are friends from antiquity; share a superb and timeless bonding free of any kind of dispute—ideological, cultural and territorial. And the naturalness of the partnership opened up only recently with Modi’s assumption of the Prime Minister’s office in India. Although they are unique kind of nations in Asia having reciprocal sentimental standing, generous gestures and popular goodwill towards each other which can rarely be found among other (…)

• Irom Sharmila, Released by Law, is Rearrested by Police

  13 September 2014, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Vietnam: the Mai Lai Massacre is known as “the most shocking episode of the Vietnam war”. One morning in 1968, a platoon of US soldiers entered the sprawling Vietnamese village, saw men and women and children getting ready to go to the market, and began shooting without warning. A man was pushed into a well and a grenade thrown into it. Some 20 women and children kneeled before a temple deity praying. They were all shot in the head. Some 70-80 villagers were pushed into an (…)

• Meenakashipuram Conversion and National Upheaval

  13 September 2014, by A K Biswas

  Meenakshipuram, a village in Ramanatha-puram (now Theni) district in Tamil Nadu, was the epicentre of an extraordinary social, political and religious upheaval in 1981. A large number of men and women belonging to the Pallan community, who are Scheduled Caste,1 had embraced Islam there. Th is created consternation across India and a strong feeling of anger, abomination as also nervousness marked by accusation and allegation pervaded the atmos-phere. Untouchability, discrimination and (…)

• Preserve Radhakrishnan’s Gift to the Nation

  13 September 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  September 5 this year marked Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan‘s 126th birth anniversary. Every year September 5 is observed as Teacher’s Day in honour of the second President of our Republic since he was a great teacher. This year too Teacher’s Day was observed throughout the country but the focus was on PM Narendra Modi and not a word was written in the media about the genesis of the Day with reference to Dr Radhakrishnan; in fact Narendra Modi himself only cursorily (…)

• A Straw in the Wind

  13 September 2014, by Kuldip Nayar

  It appears that the magic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is waning. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has met a reverse in the bypolls. Out of the 18 seats in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar, the BJP won only seven. The parliamentary election held nearly four months ago saw the BJP sweeping and even getting a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha.
  The disenchantment of the voters in such a small period is indeed a point of deeper analysis. True, the party made too many promises (…)