Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Sri Lanka: Behind Rajapaksa’s Defiance

  22 April 2013, by Apratim Mukarji

  What was widely anticipated has now been confirmed. The Sri Lankan Government reaffirmed on April 9 that it does not concur with the US-sponsored resolution adopted at the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva on March 22 and that the government, therefore, will not hold talks with anyone on the related matters.
  The government has also rejected the report of the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Nina Pillai, which forms the basis of the hearings of the UNHRC session on the alleged human (…)

• Chronicles of a Gamechanger

  22 April 2013, by Uttam Sen

  BOOK REVIEW
  Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya; Penguin Viking, India; 2011; Rs 499.
  A realistically insightful volume sheds light on the process by which ideas percolate a culture and arguably create their own fusion. The scholarly antecedents of the author, with a professional eye on documentation, are bonuses. The historian’s facility reaches out to connect fragments of events and the human condition across the country and the world in Rabindranath (…)

• On Prabhat Patnaik’s Rejoinder

  22 April 2013

  COMMUNICATION
  I approached with eagerness the rejoinder of Prabhat Patnaik (PP) in Mainstream no. 16 of April 6, 2013. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. He basically avoided the subject matter of my paper, namely, how the working classs gains revolutionary consciousness. He only highlighted what was really a side issue added by me at the end of the article, which really did not have any necessary relation with the main thrust of the paper. In that article towards the end I (…)

• West Bengal’s Creditable Record

  22 April 2013, by Barun Das Gupta

  The report card on the creditable performance of her governent in several respects that the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, presented to the Planning Commission during her discussions about the Plan allocation for West Bengal for 2013-14 has been totally ignored by the media for reasons best known to it.
  Even Rajiv Shukla, the Union Minister of State for Planning, and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, were appreciative of the performance. (…)

• Lenin and New International Economic Order

  22 April 2013, by Anil Rajimwale

  April 22 this year marks V.I. Lenin’s 143rd birth anniversary. On this occasion we are carrying the following piece by a well-known Marxist ideologue and senior CPI leader.
  It was way back in 1922 that Lenin advanced the concept of new international economic order (NIEO). That was in the context of the Genoa conference of European nations, where a reordering and reconstruction of the post-First World War Europe was to be discussed, basically in the economic field. It was also in this (…)

• Sexuality and Conspiracy: National and International Spheres

  22 April 2013, by Sunita Samal

  WOMEN’S WORLD
  Introduction
  Is sexuality a stigmatised knowledge? Is it ego’s freedom? Sigmund Freud characterised it as melancholia or inability to grieve or as narcissistic disorder. There is a individual quest for instinctual freedom but civilisation demands conformity and instinctual repression. Here, sexuality represents a false mastery of an egoistic psychology in which the conspiracy is that consciousness has not adequately distinguished itself from the environment. The melancholia (…)

• Is Democracy Bad For Women?

  22 April 2013

  by Tamanna Khosla
  Women have always had a strong stake in democracy. Democracy requires that citizens’ interests be heard, deliberated and legislated on. Women are half of the world’s population, and as such their voice should be heard in the democratic process. Democracy needs women in order to be truly democratic, and women need democracy if they are to change the systems and laws that preclude them, and preclude societies as a whole, from attaining equality.
  But the crimes against (…)

• On Modi’s Social Engineering

  22 April 2013, by Subhash Gatade

  The system of untouchability has been a goldmine for the Hindus. This system affords 60 millions of untouchables to do the dirty work of scavenging and sweeping to the 240 million Hindus who are debarred by their religion to do such dirty work. But the work must be done for the Hindus and who else than the untouchables? —Dr B.R. Ambedkar
  Can shit collection or cleaning of gutters—which has condemned lakhs of people to a life of indignity since ages—be considered a ‘Spiritual Experience’? (…)

• Army’s Right to Rape and Kill Must Go if North-East is to be a Part of India

  22 April 2013, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  It was pop culture at its defiant best when the Nirvana band sang in 1993: “Rape me, Rape me again/ Hate me, Do it and do it again/ Waste me, Rape me, my friend.” Kurt Cobain who wrote the lines described it as “a life-affirming song... like she is saying: ‘Go ahead, rape me, beat me. You’ll never kill me. I’ll survive this and I’m going to **ing rape you one of these days and you won’t even know it’.”
  For the pop stars of America, it was one more jab of fashionable (…)

• Nation Bruised even as Hopes are Rekindled

  14 April 2013, by SC

  Yesterday a sessions court in Delhi set aside the order of a magisterial court in April 2010, that is, precisely three years ago, accepting the closure report of the CBI on the charges against Congress leader Jagdish Tytler in an anti-Sikh riots case. Tytler, a former Union Minister, was accused of instigating a mob on November 1, 1984 that led to three persons, who had taken shelter in a gurdwara, losing their lives. The Additional Sessions Judge, who set aside the 2010 magesterial order, (…)