Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Spirit of August Fifteenth

  15 August 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  August Fifteenth, the day when the Tricolour of independent India was hoisted on the ramparts of the Red Fort thirtyseven years ago, not only brings back the imprishable memories of the nation’s freedom struggle in which millions upon millions participated, but also reminds us of the pledges unredeemed and the commitments unfulfilled.
  In the four decades since independence, the nation has been unified as the mosaic of petty princedoms disappeared; the economy has (…)

• Communal Challenge to Free India

  15 August 2014

  [(Desh Raj Goyal, 84, passed away in New Delhi after a brief illness in the afternoon of February 3, 2013. A veteran journalist and academic, he was the editor of Secular Democracy. From 1963 to 1967 he edited Mainstream.
  Goyal-sahb was a crusader against the growing menace of communalism in the country since he fully comprehended the threat it posed having himself been a full-time RSS pracharak (like PM Narendra Modi) in his youth. He later eschewed his connections with the RSS and joined (…)

• Habitation and a Name for India in the BRICS

  15 August 2014, by M K Bhadrakumar

  I
  If the annual BRICS summit meeting, which just ended in Fortaleza, Brazil, assumed an unprecedented level of interest in India, three reasons could be attributed to it.
  First and foremost, India has a new govern-ment which took office in late May. The new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi is not exactly a stranger to international diplomacy and foreign policy, but during the election campaign for the 2014 parliamentary poll, he almost exclusively focused on domestic issues, and other than (…)

• ’It Is Majoritarianism That Needs To Be Contested’

  15 August 2014

  (Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow and the celebrated author of The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan and, most recently, of The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide. In this wide-ranging interview, she spoke to Ather Farouqui, the General Secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), New Delhi, on a host of issues.)
  The following interview (…)

• Natwar’s Betrayal

  15 August 2014, by Nandita Haksar

  Like many of my fellow citizens I too watched the recent interview of Natwar Singh by Karan Thapar. The contents of the interview made front-page headlines in national newspapers. Having heard the interview in which Karan Thapar emphasised that the 80-year-old diplomat-turned-politician had revealed much more in the interview than he had done in his book. What has he revealed?
  This is not in defence of Sonia Gandhi. She is capable of defending herself. This is not in defence of the (…)

• Consumption and Protection: Understanding BJP’s Victory

  15 August 2014

  by Sri Ram Pandeya
  The recent outcry in responsible scholarly discussions about the secular setting of our society getting affected due to a leader becoming the Prime Minister of India, even as he vows to homogenise society, has led to a renewal of interest in some of our democratic values. While the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been attributed to the more secular development agenda, it is a victory for the majority community as well (at least) for two reasons: first, (…)

• In Defence of the Chatterati

  15 August 2014, by Uttam Sen

  We face a problem of value-judgment today. Place and time have something to do with it. Post-independence, people from the older cosmopolitan cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai were most visibly “political”. The others are now being seen and heard. We had an amorphous “intelligentsia”, which wielded power and influence disproportionate to its middle class genesis, but was bona fide nevertheless. This configuration was spawned by a rich-agrarian—political-party-bureaucracy alignment. It (…)

• Hindutva, the Asiatic Mode of Production and Indian Revolution

  15 August 2014

  by Murzban Jal
  Finally, in the struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to streng-then, along with the repressive powers,the resourcesand centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor. But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, under (…)

• Slow and Steady Destruction of Togetherness

  15 August 2014, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Last week I was in Uttar Pradesh. And I saw and sensed communal politics at its peak. Citizens, cutting across communities and castes, sat apprehensive and worried. It was more than writ large that the BJP and Right-wing outfits are spreading poison, dividing people on religious and caste lines. Though these divisions have been ongoing right from the early nineties but now this poison is getting unleashed right into rural belts, under all possible garbs and ploys and (…)

• In India—and in No Other Country—Rape is Justified by Home Ministers, MPs, Casteists. It’s our Shame

  15 August 2014, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  In this season of rape...ugh, what a miserable way to start a column! If only we could say instead: "In this land of milk and honey where the sun shines equally on all and the birds..." But that would be false. In our country the sun shineth the way rain raineth. The rain it raineth on the just/And also on the unjust fella/But chiefly on the just, because/The unjust have the just’s umbrella. Brutality hits both men and women, but chiefly women because men have the backing of (…)