Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Light and Shade

  5 November 2011, by SC

  Libyan strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s gruesome end oustide Sirte in the morning of October 20 was the most noteworthy event on the international front in the last few days. While the precise manner of his killing is still shrouded in mystery and his wife’s demand for a UN investigation into her husband’s death appears reasonable, what cannot be overlooked is the NATO role in ensuring his capture and bringing about his death since it was a French Mirage of the NATO forces that struck (…)

• India’s Moment of Truth in Afghanistan

  5 November 2011, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Recently I read an extraordinary book on Afghanistan, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign by Sherard Cowper-Coles. Sir Sherard had everything going for him as a career diplomat in the British Foreign Service when he completed his term in Kabul and was appointed as the special representative of the British Prime Minister for AfPak. He was a close associate of late Richard Holbrooke, apparently had smooth working relationship with his American colleagues, (…)

• Who Selects Whom and How!

  5 November 2011

  COMMUNICATION
  During the recent impeachment proceedings in the Rajya Sabha, some members did a little loud thinking about the mechanism for selection of judges of the High Courts. Decades ago, in course of an endowment lecture at the Ambedkar Law College of the Nagpur University, eminent jurist Upendra Baxi had recommended the adoption of the American system for such selection. The US President can make such appointment only after his nominee has been vetted by a bipartisan committee of (…)

• Censoring Ramanujan’s Essay on Ramayana

  5 November 2011

  by DILEEP PADGAONKAR
  Nothing straight can ever emerge from the crooked timber of a parochial mind. Those responsible for the decision to drop A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from Delhi University’s undergraduate Arts course argue in substance that from childhood these students are told about the sacred character of the epic. This is why it occupies a special place in the Indian psyche. Its characters are perceived to be divine creatures. To show them in a poor light is therefore (…)

• Meaning of ’Occupy Wall Street’

  5 November 2011, by Bharat Jhunjhunwala

  The common man of the developed countries is agitated. Hundreds are camping in a park across the Wall Street which houses the New York Stock Exchange. People are holding demons-trations at City Square in Melbourne and in front of the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney. Similar demonstrations are taking place in Athens, Tokyo, Taipei and Seoul. The reason is unemployment and inequality. These youth believe the bankers have speculated, made huge losses and brought down the global economy (…)

• Protests Erupt in over 1500 Cities Worldwide

  5 November 2011

  FROM TAHRIR SQUARE TO TIMES SQUARE
  The following piece appeared in ML Update, the weekly newsmagazine of the CPI-ML (Liberation), in its October 18-24, 2011 issue and is being reproduced from there with due acknowledgement.
  Tens of thousands flooded the streets of global financial centres, capital cities and small towns on October 15.
  After triumphing in a standoff with the authorities over the continued protest of Wall Street at Liberty Square in Manhattan’s financial district, the (…)

• Capitalism, Republicans, and the American Spring

  5 November 2011, by Eddie J Girdner

  “Help! Thief! I´ve been robbed, I´ve been robbed by the capitalists and the government!” ‘’There aint but two sides, the workers side and the big bosses side.’’ —Woody Guthrie
  This cry is being heard more and more around the cities and capitals of the United States and Western Europe today and even further around the globe.
  Is there a genuine awakening among the American youth? The recent Occupy Wall Street Movement suggests that an awareness of the destructive and unethical nature of (…)

• Time to beat Swords into Ploughshares

  5 November 2011, by Uttam Sen

  The striking aspect of the European financial crisis on the heels of the American was corroboration that the asymmetry which had erupted in the First World War was being played back. To some the causality of the periodic rises and falls of the global financial architecture is confined to tentative insights on cycles provided by the Russian economist, Nikolai Kondratiev (later a victim of the Stalinist purges). But the occurrence has remained a legacy of the liberal capitalist world inherited (…)

• Stakeholders in Junglemahal and Battle between the Lines

  5 November 2011

  by SUBRATA BAGCHI
  In the wake of the West Bengal Chief Minister’s announcement of a development package for Junglemahal and without mincing words for the Maoists, the debates within the civil rights movements regarding the release of political prisoners and withdrawal of the joint forces from Junglemahal are now rocking the entire political spectrum. It seems that the detention of Chhatradhar Mahato and Manoj Mahato, leaders of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA),1 and (…)

• J&K: The Way Forward

  5 November 2011

  by JAYAN P.A.
  The much-awaited report on Jammu and Kashmir (hereinafter J and K) was submitted by the three interlocutors—journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, academic Radha Kumar, former Information Commissioner M.M. Ansari—to the Union Home Ministry on October 12, 2011. The three-member panel was appointed by the Centre exactly a year ago with a mandate to suggest the contours of a political settlement of the J and K problem. The report is the outcome of the interactions of the three (…)