Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Reflections on Indo-Soviet Treaty’s abiding significance

  10 August 2011

  August 9, 1971 was a memorable day. On that day the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation was signed. This acted as a reliable shield defending India’s independence during the Indira Gandhi Government’s extension of fraternal assistance for helping the East Pakistani people attain freedom from West Pakistani yoke at the fag end of 1971. On the fortieth anniversary of these momentous developments, we reproduce N.C.’s following pieces written as ‘Political Notebook’ in (…)

• Democratising Democracy, South American Style

  10 August 2011, by Ash Narain Roy

  Rewriting Constitutions comes easy to Latin American leaders. Brazil has modified its 1988 Constitution 14 times. Chile has changed its 1980 Constitution seven times. Colombia has added 16 modifications to its 1993 Constitution. Does it show Latin America’s growing impatience with the non-performing models? Or are they undermining democratic principles in the name of pursuing more radical agenda? What Bolivia and Ecuador have done in recent years begs a serious analysis.
  Ecuador and (…)

• Dynamics of Democracy and Corruption

  10 August 2011, by Chandra Mohan Bhandari

  One of the features of a modern democratic set-up is its inherent contradiction. Like the necessity of thesis and antithesis acting simul-taneously it relies upon opposing trends to propel it. To keep a vast social network together, in a meaningful co-existence and in a more-or-less harmonious mode of existence, is a challenging but manageable task, if that kind of challenge is understood and acknowledged by the people at the helm of affairs supposedly responsible for managing the show. The (…)

• The UID Aadhaar Project - System Design and Security Considerations

  10 August 2011, by S G Vombatkere

  The Unique Identification (UID) project, also known as Aadhaar, has been pushed into implementation by the creation of a UID Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2009. It is slated to spend Rs 45,000 to Rs1,50,000 crores with a sanctioned budget of Rs 3000 crores without approval of Parliament. Nandan M. Nilekani has been nominated to head the UIDAI and accorded a Cabinet Minister’s rank. [Note 1] This is not unconnected with the publication of his book Imagining India in 2009, and his former (…)

• Rethinking Beggary Laws in India

  10 August 2011

  by SUDEEP BASU
  The felt need is to move away from the ‘custodialisation’ framework of anti-beggary laws to one that stresses on ‘vocationalisation’ or skill building exercises for beggars.
  For several decades beggars fending for themselves on the streets of Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata have been at the mercy of anti-beggary laws meant to create aesthetically appealing and ‘livable’ cities. In August 2010 the media reported a high incidence of death of the inmates in a beggars’ colony in (…)

• Beggars as Non-citizens

  10 August 2011, by Ambrose Pinto

  In the death of more than 120 people in the beggars’ colony in Bangalore managed by the State in August 2010 due to total apathy and indifference by the officials of the Karnataka State, the question that is raised is whether the beggars living in the colony have rights. It was difficult to ascertain the exact reasons for the deaths. The authorities of the colony have claimed the deaths to be natural. Others suspect food poisoning or gastroenteritis. The colony residents say stale and (…)

• Any Lessons from Norway on Internal Threat from Xenophobic Fanaticism of the Majority?

  10 August 2011, by John Dayal

  ”The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamo-fascism’—that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning—but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly White Europeans take to the streets to terrorise minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority,” Prof Dilip Simeon wrote to me in a message on my Facebook profile. This was after I wrote that zealots and terrorists of all sorts live in a zone where it (…)

• Karl Marx Never Lied—testifies the Treasures of Sri Padmanabha

  10 August 2011, by K G Somasekharan Nair

  While discoursing upon the prolonged golden age of India that existed before colonial subjugation made by the pauperised English Sovereign for terrorised plunder and proselytisation, Karl Marx wrote: “Oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of (…)

• The World’s Richest Gold-Jewel Collection? Our New Pride—and Responsibility

  10 August 2011, by T J S George

  One thing is now clear: India is a very rich country, perhaps the richest in the world. Gold reserves play a decisive role in central banking around the globe which makes the yellow metal a currency rather than a commodity. India has more of this currency than any other country.
  It’s not in the hands of the central bank of course, but gold is gold. No other people have the fascination for gold that Indian people have. Many an economist has covetously said that if the gold held by Indian (…)

• Fighting Terror and Eliminating Corruption

  1 August 2011, by SC

  As Norway and the entire Europe come to terms with 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik’s senseless act of killing as many as 76 persons (not 93 as originally estimated)—68 gunned down by himself on Utoeya island and nine from the bombing in Oslo—on July 22, in his first comment on the brutal massacre Breivik is learnt to have asserted, through his lawyer, that his attacks were “atrocious but necessary” to defeat the liberal immigration policies of his country and spread of Islam. In the (…)