Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tackle the Disease, not the Symptoms

  27 December 2011, by Girish Mishra

  In the late 1970s the world entered an era of turmoil. The so-called golden age of capitalism gave way to stagflation, that is, stagnation in output along with inflation. Unemployment soared. A chaotic situation prevailed. People of advanced capitalist countries were bewildered. Questions were sought to be raised about the efficacy of the long-continuing Keynesian approach that had rescued America and other Western countries from the Great Depression. Votaries of some almost dead or zombie (…)

• FDI in Retail and the 21st Century Drain of Wealth

  27 December 2011, by Sandhya Jain

  In an address to the Congress Parliamentary Party on December 8, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee lamented that the UPA coalition was forced to suspend the Cabinet decision to allow 51 per cent foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail (like Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour and others) in order to avert a mid-term poll. Mukherjee mourned that this ’progressive’ measure—which would please Western govern-ments pushing for FDI in the Indian retail sector—had to be sacrificed because (…)

• Manmohanomics Today: Towards Perpetuation of Poverty

  27 December 2011, by Diptendra Raychaudhuri

  After experiencing twenty years of the ‘Reform’ process Manmohan Singh started in 1991, it seems the ‘messiah’ wants to be remembered in future only by the elite of the country as their greatest champion. Perhaps he does not care for the rest, and will be least perturbed if they remember him as someone who harmed their existence in many ways. But, the social cost the country will have to pay in future for the insensitive part of the reform process may turn out to be huge. Singh’s recent bold (…)

• Democratic Meaning of the Anna Movement: One View

  27 December 2011

  by SATISH K. JHA
  The true meaning of the Anna phenomenon would be known only in due course of time. In the meantime, the debate surrounding the Anna movement has got so much charged up that it is becoming difficult to make a political judgment on it.
  The whole spectrum of the debate is so diverse and polarised that the characterisations of the movement have acquired mind-boggling proportion. It starts at one end by declaring it as a middle class cyber-politics and a corporate sponsored (…)

• Travelling was at Three Miles an Hour, but in that Era too, Mamool was a Habit

  27 December 2011, by T J S George

  How times change! It is routine these days for a Chennai businessman to take a morning flight to Delhi, complete his work there, and return the same night to the bliss of his own bed. A briefcase is more than enough by way of baggage.
  Things were somewhat different in the days of Enugula Veeraswamy, a Madras denizen of the 1830s. He went on a pilgrimage to Banaras which took him “one year, three months, five days and ten minutes” to complete. That was mainly because the mode of transport (…)

• Civil Society, Corruption and Social Change

  27 December 2011, by Anil Rajimwale

  The words ‘civil society’ have become quite popular lately, thanks mainly to the recent movement against corruption led by Anna Hazare. At least one good thing that has emerged is the consciousness and self-consciousness of the civil society, whatever may be its interpretation by various commentators. Unfortunately, for the most part, the term is being used without its real and scientific meaning.
  Scientific Interpretation
  CIVIL SOCIETY delimits that part of the society which is not (…)

• Valuable Addition to Literature on Election Studies

  27 December 2011, by Ranbir Singh

  BOOK REVIEW
  India: 2009 Elections—Coalition Politics, Party Competition and Congress Continuity by Paul Wallace and Ramashray Roy (ed.); Sage Publications, New Delhi; 2011; pages XVIII+412; Price Rs 995.
  This book is a continuation of the earlier election studies—Indian Politics and the 1998 Elections: Regionalisation, Hindutva and State Politics (1999); India’s 1999 Elections and the 20th Century Politics (2003), India’s 2004 Elections: Grassroots and National Perspectives (2007)—which (…)

• Impact of Unabated Anthropogenic Activities on the Ganga-Yamuna system

  27 December 2011, by Sudhanshu Bhandari

  RIVER, RIVER SURELY DYING
  It was at the 1981 session of the Indian Science Congress in Varanasi that scientists expressed concern at the growing chemical and biological pollution in the river Ganga in presence of the then Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi. As a result of her initiative, the Planning Commission asked the Central Board for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution, New Delhi to conduct studies on the state of the river Ganga. In collaboration with the State Pollution Control (…)

• Mayawati’s Gerrymandering: Fourfold Division of UP

  27 December 2011, by A K Biswas

  The State of Uttar Pradesh—at the bottom in the club of India’s sick States, BIMARU1—seems to stand at a crossroad. The UP Assembly has adopted a resolution on November 21, 2011 for a fourfold division of the State, which, according to the latest census, boasts of 19,95,81,477 persons. This size makes it the nation’s most populous State. Since the mid-eighties, an acronym BIMARU resembling a Hindi word “Bimar”, meaning sick, has come to signify a group of north and north-western States, that (…)

• Kashmir: Whither Strategy?

  27 December 2011

  by ALI AHMED
  It is often said that India does not have a strategic culture, implying that it is unable to think strategically. In other words, it cannot match ‘means’ with ‘ends’, or perhaps it is incapable of arriving at aims in the first place. The counter-argument usually heard is that if that were the case, then India would by now have been—as Churchill once famously but mistakenly put it—merely a ‘geographical expression’. The controversy surrounding the Armed Forces Special Powers (…)