Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Aam Aadmi, Poverty Line, Modi’s Image

  28 July 2013, by SC

  The gulf between the politician and the common citizen, the aam aadmi, is widening by the day. One is getting proof of that almost on a daily basis. But what two spokespersons of the Congress, the party leading the ruling coalition at the Centre, claimed in the last two days magnified that alienation of the leading figures in the ruling party from the ordinary people despite the fact that the former never tire themselves of asserting that they articulate the aspirations of the latter. (…)

• Craziness about FDI

  28 July 2013

  by Pannalal Surana
  The Finance Minister and his officers have become panicky. There has been persistent withdrawal of bond money. The reasons seem to be two-fold. The rupee is falling. So earlier the withdrawal, lesser the loss. Secondly, multi-national companies need more liquidity in the American market because the Federal Reserve (Central bank of the USA) is rolling back the policy of advancing stimulant money initiated in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. The announcement was made (…)

• Will the Criminals and their Patrons heed Judicial Ruling? It’s a War

  28 July 2013, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Only figuratively do legislatures represent the people; in real terms they represent the political class. When a legislature passes an irresponsible law, the political class as a whole stands condemned. This is patently so when laws are passed to protect criminals in the House. Such transgressions have been going on for a while, enabling murderers and rapists to function as law-makers and as Cabinet Ministers. Democracy was shamed in the process and India disgraced before the (…)

• Mid-Day Meal: Scope of Improvement

  28 July 2013

  by Ritesh Dwivedi
  The National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) was launched as a Centrally sponsored scheme on August 15, 1995, initially in 2408 blocks of the country. Today the NP-NSPE is the largest feeding programme covering about 12 crore children in over 9.50 lakh schools across the country. Barring a few, all States are providing 3 kg of wheat/rice per child per month. It was only after the directives of the Supreme Court that cooked Mid-Day Meal (…)

• Obituary: Kalpana Dutt

  28 July 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  July 27 marks the legendary freedom fighter, Kalpana Dutt’s birth centenary. On this occasion we remember her and offer our sincere tribute to her abiding memory by reproducing the following piece N.C. wrote in her honour eighteen years ago in February 1995 following her demise on February 8 that year.
  On February 8 passed away in a Calcutta hospital a frail figure who sixty years ago became a legend in the classical mould. Kalpana Dutt, born in 1913 in a (…)

• Army Still Dominates Pakistan

  28 July 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  It is an open secret that the Army in Pakistan is a peg or two higher than the civilian apparatus. But I saw chinks in its armoury when a commission report was leaked. That the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) could be “a collaborator” in hiding Osama bin Laden, the Taliban’s inspiration, was an insinuation which I thought the Army would not pocket without demur. But that happened.
  I was, however, reading too much into the leakage. Within a few days, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif went to (…)

• Modi’s Catch-22: Caught between Programme and Proclivity

  28 July 2013, by Badri Raina

  Come to think of it, imagine how many great souls have been done in by their eventual failure to balance within them the claims of nature and culture.
  Narendra Modi is clearly the latest, and perhaps the most dangerously acute, instance of the conundrum.
  Events since 2002 are proof that what comes naturally to Modi is to fight his smallness of mind, wrapped in outsized ambition, by donning a self-regarding “burqa” of paranoia, constructing enemies on a sustained basis, using what (…)

• The Survival of Humanity is at Stake

  28 July 2013

  by T. Sadashivam
  The issue of Development versus Environment has again come in the public discourse because of the Uttarakhand tragedy. Although the debate over development versus environment has been there since the past many decades, what added a new dimension to it was a term called ‘Climate Change’. According to the World Bank, a ‘climate change is a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, a change that alters the composition of the global (…)

• Open Letter to PM and Tamil Nadu CM

  28 July 2013, by S G Vombatkere

  Sir and Madam,
  Today is a historic day for two wrong reasons. First, because on this day, July 16, 1945, the world’s first experimental nuclear explosion was conducted at Alamagorodo, USA, as a precursor to the next two nuclear experiments over Japan on August 6 and 8 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And second, for us in India, it immediately follows the Kudankulam nuclear power plant (KKNPP) going critical in contempt of the people’s well-founded fears for safety and health through calculated (…)

• Obama’s Monica Moment

  28 July 2013, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The following article, published in Asia Times in June, is reproduced here, with due acknowledgement, as its contents are still relevant.
  The United States may have administered one of the biggest-ever snubs to the Kremlin in the post-Cold War era with the White House announcement on Thursday that it will provide military support to the Syrian rebels.
  The announcement in Washington said:
  “Following a deliberative review, our [US] intelligence community assesses that the [Bashar al-] (…)