Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Marxism and Aggression

  3 January 2013, by S.A. Dange

  Mainstream has put to me the question: How is it that a Socialist country can commit aggression?
  The question is quite natural and legitimate. It arises from the fact of history itself. Way back in 1959 when we were confronted with the beginnings of the India-China border clashes, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of India at its Calcutta meeting held the opinion that a Socialist country, like China, cannot commit aggression, and a free democratic India does not want (…)

• The Nehru Legacy: A Self-critical Communist Evaluation

  3 January 2013, by P.C. Joshi

  There is the danger of paying fulsome tributes to Nehru and then drifiting with the current so far as Congressmen are concerned. And as for the Left, of being coldly formally correct and then sit aside on the sandy shore and curse the rest. Breast-beating and self-righteousness are India’s age-old national political failings. There is a fairly wide consensus that the future of our country lies in making the Nehru legacy our living national legacy, more actively and consistently than it was (…)

• A Tribute

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Generations spanning over centuries have been told that the French Revolution devoured its own children. In a sense, this could be said also of the Russian Revolution in which many of its heroes had themselves to face the firing squad.
  There is however the other side, the heroic aspect of every revolution as it throws up leaders, and these in turn try to carry forward the revolution itself. Aruna Asaf Ali was one of these beautiful children reared by the Indian people’s revolution for (…)

• Danger Signal of Degeneration

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  I write these lines after a fortnight has passed since that shocking incident took place in a suburb of the city of Calcutta. Three women and their driver returning from duty assigned by the government’s Health Department were detained by a gang of ruffians, their belongings looted, their van set on fire and they were beaten and the women criminally assaulted, in which one of them died alongwith the driver and two others are still hospitalised.
  This ghastly crime was committed in a (…)

• The Valley of Incongruities

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Whatever may be the substance of the much-advertised point of difference between Peking and Washington over the question of détente, it may be safely assumed that Gerald Ford’s talks with Mao Tse-tung and his cohorts explored the further potentialities of Sino-American collusion, particularly in the countries of the Third World. Angola shows the enormity of this entente while the happenings in Bangladesh underscores this danger in our immediate neighbourhood.
  The Sino-American (…)

• Journey beyond Marx

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  In the midst of the excitement over the dramatic developments taking place before our very eyes in the Soviet Union, we tend to miss their historic significance. In the presence of History, one is apt to miss its majesty.
  Perhaps no other single event since the Second World War can match the current revolution in the Soviet Union in its far-reaching dimensions. Never before the crack-up of such a powerful state has taken place with so little of violence. Barring the Indian and Chinese (…)

• Good-bye Feroze

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Parliament has just repealed the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act which came into force twenty years ago in 1956. Late Feroze Gandhi, who initiated and piloted the Bill in Parliament, made a powerful case which might have been useful for the present Government to bear in mind. Sri Bhupesh Gupta, in his signed article in New Age of February 1, 1976, has recalled Feroze Gandhi’s speech, from which a significant portion is reproduced here below:
  “For the success of (…)

• Do We Need Nehru Today?

  3 January 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Twelve years ago Jawaharlal Nehru died is harness on May 27. Inevitably, much has changed in these twelve years among his people and in the humanity at large. He was not the man who would have preferred the status quo to change; and if the landscape and the skyline of his country have changed—at places beyond recognition—Nehru, had he been alive, would have tried to understand them, accelerate the process of change.
  What we who belong to the generations after him have to ponder over is (…)

• Indian Left Today

  3 January 2013, by E.M.S. Namboodiripad

  Nineteen Eightyeight will go down in history as the year in which a widely current myth was exploded—the myth that the entire Opposition from the extreme Left to the extreme Right should be united in a single combination if the Congress is to be defeated. It is being increasingly recognised that there cannot be a single Opposition in which the Right and the Left segments are united.
  As late as a year ago, the Left was under attack (from the Centrist political leaders and from the most (…)

• North Korean Unha-3 Launch: How Effective are Sanctions in the Midst of the Game of Balancing?

  3 January 2013

  by Shubhra Chaturvedi
  The North Korean rocket launch on December 12, 2012 in the Pyongyang province, that came after much speculated delay, achieved the goal that it probably aimed at: an immediate deterrent. The launch is a clear indication of North Korea’s intentions of developing the long range capability to deliver nuclear weapons as far as the United States mainland. Though the “peaceful rocket launch” does not classify as the long-range ballistic missile test, it does come across as (…)