Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Threat to Syria Averted

  14 June 2014, by Harish Chandola

  This piece was sent before the election to Syria’s presidency.
  President Bashar Assad of Syria will soon be seeking a new term of office. He appears to have overcome the threat to his regime from military intervention from the United States, Britain and France. The threat to it posed by foreign-supported Sunni jihadists, who have been waging an armed struggle to oust him since 2011, is diminishing. It caused much devastation, killed thousands and rendered millions as refugees, now living (…)

• Rapes, Gang-rapes, Prostitution

  14 June 2014, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Rapes and gang-rapes! Sexual maniacs on the prowl! Perversion hitting all possible quarters—right from the rural to the urban belts, from the top brass to the lowest rung!
  What’s shocking is this accompanying factor—in the Badaun gang-rape-cum-murder of the two minors girls, cops are more than involved. The very ‘protector’ turns your rapist! And to top it all, there is politics even in this horrible mess. Every possible political outfit is there to demolish Akhilesh Yadav’s (…)

• India and Sri Lanka: Emerging Parallels

  14 June 2014, by Apratim Mukarji

  As the dust over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections settles down and the stock-taking exercise comes to an end, a question that emerges is if for the first time in republican India the Muslim community accounting for as much as 14.6 per cent of the total population (2011 Census) has begun to lose its relevance to the core identity of the Indian polity.
  It would be rash and inadvisable to accept this assessment within a few days of thepublication of the election results, constitution of the new (…)

• Contours of China Crisis

  14 June 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Twentyfive years ago, N.C. had left for China when the Tiananmen bloodbath took place on June 4, 1989. Apart from his despatches which appeared in The Times of India on the tragedy that befell that great country at that time, he also wrote this detailed piece which was published in Mainstream (June 17, 1989). This was an enlarged version of an article in The Times of India (June 12, 1989).
  The contours of the emerging set-up in China are still very blurred as the (…)

• Remembering Tiananmen

  14 June 2014

  No miracle will ever clean
  The memory, bestial and obscene,
  Of those who, having fouled their trust,
  Grew warped with dread and powerlust—
  And ordered fire on the square,
  On unarmed people everywhere,
  Brave people seeking to be free
  Of rottenness, of tyranny.
  —Vikram Seth
  [This poem was written twentyfive years ago and published in The Times of India on June 6, 1989. It is being reproduced—courtesy The Times of India—in memory of the Tiananmen martyrs.]

• On C. Rajeswara Rao’s birth centenary

  14 June 2014
  • C. Rajeswara Rao, As I Knew Him by A.B. Bardhan
  • Com CR: A Fearless Warrior of Indian Revolution by P.K. Balakrishnan

• Left Forces should Awake now before it is Too Late

  14 June 2014, by Bharat Dogra

  communication
  Despite all the recent setbacks suffered by the Left forces, in the general elections and before this, two facts cannot be denied. Firstly, it is the politics of the rights of the poor, the politics of equality and justice, which is the most relevant politics particularly in India’s context. As this is also the defining feature of the Left forces, so these forces remain very relevant. Secondly, keeping in mind the fact that the majority of India’s people cannot even access (…)

• Loss of an Ideological Battle

  14 June 2014, by Ambrose Pinto

  As people committed to Centrist politics, the victory of the BJP in the parliamentary elections has saddened many of us. That in no way means that we are making a case for the existing Congress. Not many tears are shed for the defeat of the Congress. The Congress surely deserved what it got, 44 seats in a House of 543, the lowest ever. The party can only reap what it had sown. Not only scams and scandals during the UPA regime, there was also plenty of arrogance besides the total betrayal of (…)

• The Left Debacle In Lok Sabha 2014: A Critical Overview

  14 June 2014

  by Amrita Datta
  Marx was right—history does repeat itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. The CPI-M’s unsettling performance in the Lok Sabha Election 2009 was tragedy impending; premonition was overt that the party had entered the stage of organisational and ideological crises which, if not addressed immediately, would take it down to the ultimate abyss. However, no change happened, neither in the perspective of the party leaders, nor in their internal party organisation; and the (…)

• Handloom: An Endangered Industry

  14 June 2014

  book review
  by Imtiaz Ahmad Ansari
  Entangled Yarns: Banaras Weavers and Social Crisis by Vasanthi Raman; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; 2013; pp. X+126 (Hardcover).
  The book Entangled Yarns: Banaras Weavers and Social Crisis by Vasanthi Raman deals with the various dimensions of the weaving industry in Banaras and the people associated with it. The book is a sequel to her previous book, titled Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity Among Banaras Weavers, (…)