Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Vo Nguyen Giap: ‘General of Peace’

  14 October 2013, by Sumit Chakravartty

  TRIBUTE
  General Vo Nguyen Giap is no more. He died in an Army hospital in Hanoi on October 5, 2013 at the age of 102, according to Tuoi Tre Online. The New York Times described him as the “relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese General whose battlefield victory at Dien Bien Phu drove France out of Vietnam and whose tenacious resisance to the United States in a long and costly war there eventually snapped America’s political will to fight”. While offering our heartfelt tributes to one (…)

• Effective Act against Communal and Targeted Violence Need of the Hour Dr John Dayal’s Statement at National Integration Council

  14 October 2013

  The following is the written statement delivered by Dr John Dayal, the Secretary-General of the All India Christian Council, at the National Integration Council meeting held in New Delhi on September 23, 2013.
  Honourable Prime Minister, Honourable Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Honourable Union Ministers, Chief Ministers and other Members,
  Greetings from my community and my organisation, the All India Christian Council, which was founded in 1998 in the wake of large-scale persecution of our (…)

• Letter from Germany: Merkel Short of Absolute Majority, Reaches Out to Leftist Rivals

  14 October 2013

  by Arani Basu
  The outcome of the Bundestag Election 2013 has hardly come as a surprise. Deutschland wanted Angela Merkel to continue as the head of the country and the results are just a mere reflection of it. However, the USP of CDU’s success lies in the fact that Merkel is all set to outdo the ex-British Prime Minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, with the emphatic victory! Until now, Ms Thatcher was Europe’s longest serving female head of state. But Angela Merkel’s triumph in the (…)

• Manmohan, Chidambaram Responsible for 2G Scam: Gurudas Dasgupta

  14 October 2013

  by Kuldip Singh Arora
  Armed with facts and documents, member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on 2G spectrum Gurudas Dasgupta on September 28, 2013 dissented with the Committee’s draft report, which gave a clean-chit to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, and said that this was a fraudulent and dishonest attempt at cover-up, exonerating these people and throwing all guilt on A. Raja, the then Telecom Minister.
  “Raja of course is the villain of (…)

• There are Times when War is Better than Our Free and Fair Elections

  14 October 2013, by T J S George

  What if Hastinapura were a democracy? All the turmoil about giving half the kingdom to the Pandavas could have been avoided and the matter settled through free and fair elections. The minor irritations of democracy would have persisted—like Duryodhana putting in a fib or two in his affidavit to the Election Commission. But he couldn’t have gone too far. Any attempt to hide his net assets or pending criminal cases would have been exposed by the Crimes Wow news channel with its insider hold on (…)

• Signs of Disquiet

  14 October 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  New Delhi’s latest extravaganza is the all-in wrestling match between the President versus the Prime Minister, now being played with their respective supporters backing them with gusto.
  But those who are not directly involved in this unseemly game are disturbed by the crisis situation created by this development. This confrontation that now looms large between the President and the Prime Minister has been building up for nearly two years now: what is amazing is that (…)

• Losing Freedom to the Corporate Hawks

  14 October 2013, by Suranjita Ray

  The government campaigns for the future prospects of Bt cotton1 to boost India’s economy as it is the second largest exporter of cotton. The recent statement in the Lok Sabha on the success story of Bt cotton and call for a ‘sensitive approach’ to Genetically Modified (GM) crops by Sharad Pawar, the Union Minister of Agriculture, has once again raised suspicion about the intents of the UPA II Government. Despite the Reports of the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Agriculture and the (…)

• Olive Oil and the Supermom—Feminism and the Conspicuous Consumption Challenge

  14 October 2013

  WOMEN’S WORLD
  by Shruti Chopra
  The singular inability of India’s feminist movement to decrypt the coded messages tucked into the aggressive marketing campaigns of giant corporates pushing products and services of subjective “goodness” is bothersome. At one level it implies that the gains achieved by the previous generation of feminists have been frittered away. Since the 1920s, a mix of feminism and feminist-consumerism, which originated in the United States, has inspired Indian (…)

• Competition for Inefficiency: An Indian Perspective

  14 October 2013

  by Abhishek Kumar and Sreekutty Mohandas
  The 1980s were a decade of memorable incidents for the world in general and India in particular. The efficiency of the market economy, propagated by Thatcher and Reagan, was receiving immense political popularity and around the same time Eugene Fama’s efficient market hypothesis received rave academic acceptance. Margaret Thatcher popularised the idea of TINA (There Is No Alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary (…)

• A Gorkhaland State: How Justified?

  14 October 2013

  by Saumitra Mohan
  At a time when the Indian economy is in a tailspin with the rupee maintaining a sustained southward penchant to Newtonian forces, it is really quite disturbing and disconcerting to see some dormant Statehood movements rearing their heads in the wake of the recent decision to form a new Telangana State through division of the extant State of Andhra Pradesh. Such demands inter alia include demands for a separate State of Gorkhaland (comprising Darjeeling and the adjoining (…)