Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Media Scene Today

  18 February 2013, by Anees Chishti

  To mark fifty years of Mainstream, a panel discussion was held at the India International Centre, New Delhi on January 29, 2013; the topic was “Indian Media Scene Today: Potential and Reality”. Those who spoke on the subject were Kuldip Nayar, Nikhil Dey, Medha Patkar, Bharat Dogra, and Suhas Borker was the moderator. Anees Chishti, one of the panelists, could not attend as he was indisposed, but he sent the following piece as his contribution to the discussion. However, it could not be read (…)

• Greetings to Mainstream

  18 February 2013

  The following message of greetings were received for the January 29, 2013 meeting in the Capital to mark Mainstream’s fifty years.
  Thank you so much for the invitation. In fact I was thinking of it today. I am slightly unhappy because I am missing something I was so eager to attend. But I feel proud that I and my husband have written in Mainstream for more than forty years at least. I remember Nikhilda and Chitta Ranjan on this occasion.
  January 24, 2013 Thiruvananthapuram
  K. (…)

• Ominous Portents in Troubled Times

  15 February 2013, by SC

  “From Kashmir to Delhi, Intolerance Cuts Across Religious Boundaries”—read The Times of India’s February 5 frontpage headline over two reports of (i) J&K’s first all-girl rock band quitting after online threat by conservatives on social media and the Valley’s Grand Mufti Bashiruddin’s fatwa against the band’s public performance; and (ii) an art exhibition in the Capital coming under attack from a fringe Rightwing group (the VHP’s Durga Vahini) that branded the paintings as ‘provocative’ (…)

• Tribute: D. R. Goyal

  15 February 2013, by SC

  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. He leaves behind his son Ashit. His wife and younger son had predeceased him.
  We had invited him to attend a meeting at the India International Centre, New Delhi on January 29 to mark fifty years of Mainstream with a discussion on ‘Indian Media Scene Today: Potential and (…)

• Communal Challenge to Free India: Some Reminiscences and Reflections

  15 February 2013

  by D. R. Goyal
  For a person nurtured in the RSS culture it was not possible to share the euphoria touched off by the advent of independence. All the more so in Punjab which was bearing the brunt of partition.
  I did not belong to that part of Punjab which became part of Pakistan but I had been reading newspapers which first gave expression to the anxiety that gripped the Hindus in that area. As the historic day approached, expression of anxiety gave place to tales of horror, of murder and (…)

• Women’s Victory: Justice Verma Committee Report and the Road Ahead

  15 February 2013, by Pamela Philipose

  If the gang-rape of a 23-year-old student—on a Delhi bus on December 16, 2012—led to a sense of both outrage over and despair about the entrenched violence women experience in India, the Report of the Justice Verma Committee —emerging exactly five weeks after that incident —came as a heartening glimmer of hope for reform and justice.
  The response of women’s activists to the Report was unanimous: It was, potentially, a game-changer and transformed the manner in which the issue has been (…)

• Violating the Vulnerable—
Manifestations and Attitudes

  15 February 2013, by S G Vombatkere

  The latest spurt in crime is focussed on rape, brutal rape, brutal gang-rape. Women who resist rape and fight back are brutally mauled after being raped. In the December 16, 2012, Delhi bus gang-rape case (referred to as the “Damini case” hereinafter), one of the rapists allegedly tore out the young woman’s uterus with his bare hand. It would be insulting beasts to call these acts bestial. Men who commit rape are morally and socially at the depths of depravity and viciousness, the lowest of (…)

• Is India the Most Dangerous Place
 for Dalit Women?

  15 February 2013, by A K Biswas

  “A wave of sexual assaults has rocked the northern Indian State of Haryana. In the last one month alone, a dozen, mostly Dalit, girls and women have been raped, raising concerns about the security of women in India.” Thus went in the air a breaking news of the German television, Deutsche Welle DW TV, which is an international public broadcaster, under the headline “Sonia Gandhi promises to act as series of rapes shocks India.”1 Broadcasts of the DW are carried in 39 languages including (…)

• Of Wolves and Men

  15 February 2013, by Badri Raina

  It is a great mystery to me why wolves should have been saddled with the ill repute of being sexual predators.
  My experience of reading about animals and watching with commitment the many excellently researched documentaries about them on the chain of Discovery channels, including the National Geographic, teaches me this: that no animal, the wolf included, ever forces himself upon an unwilling or unready female of his species. Without a single exception.
  The only animal that does so (…)

• Rising Incidents of Rape in India: Problem and Solutions

  15 February 2013

  by Sudhanshu Tripathi
  Whether accompanied by violence or not, rape is, in fact, one of the most heinous, savage and lifelong agony and also trauma-inflicted brutalities perpetrated on women, and a complete violation of her self-respect and dignity leaving not only permanent physical injury but also incurable mental scars. Her sense of humiliation and utter powerlessness at the time causes such abysmal inner throes to her heart which are far more difficult to heal than the external blots on (…)