Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• An Indian’s Open Letter to President Obama

  16 November 2010, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  The following article reached us too late for publication before President Obama’s visit to India. We are publishing it now in the hope that its message will reach the US President. —Editor
  Dear President Obama,
  Your rise to the US Presidency raised expectations of the Black races and the downtrodden peoples of the world. Your fight, in the first year of your governance, for extending the health insurance cover to the unprivileged sections of the American people, earned people’s (…)

• Obama’s Address to Joint Session of Parliament

  16 November 2010

  Mr Vice President, Madame Speaker, Mr Prime Minister, Members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and most of all, the people of India.
  I thank you for the great honour of addressing the representatives of more than one billion Indians and the world’s largest democracy. I bring the greetings and friendship of the world’s oldest democracy—the USA, including nearly three million proud and patriotic Indian Americans.
  Over the past three days, my wife Michelle and I have experienced the (…)

• Indira and the Legacy

  16 November 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  One of the striking impressions of the AICC pilgrims returning from Bombay is about the Prime Minister’ style in dealing with the critics of government policies.
  This question is not something which came up all of a sudden at the Bombay AICC. In fact it has become the subject matter of avid gossips and discussions in the Capital for the last few weeks, particularly since the Prime Minister’s return from the USA. From the person-to-person broadcast to the press (…)

• Nehru for Today

  16 November 2010

  November 14 this year marks Jawaharlal Nehru’s one hundred and twentyfirst birth anniversary. On this occasion we are publishing the following excerpts from Panditji’s speeches, writings and interviews carried in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (edited by Sarvepalli Gopal). Thereafter we are reproducing three articles on Nehru by noted writer late Sajjad Zaheer (who played a seminal role in the Afro-Asian writers’ movement and was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan in (…)

• Reflections on Nehru

  16 November 2010, by Sajjad Zaheer

  I loved and respected him, worked with him and even followed him in many ways, and yet I was among his severest critics, and perhaps no one was a greater disappointment to me and to my group than Jawaharlal Nehru.
  Our two families were known to each other, from Lucknow and Allahabad, so it was not difficult for me when I came back from England in 1935, an Oxonian and a barrister-at-law, to be taken under the protective wing of Nehru. He knew, of course, that I was a red-hot Communist, but (…)

• Nehru and Indian Socialism

  16 November 2010, by Arjun Sengupta

  Jawaharlal Nehru was not the only aristocrat who entered politics and joined the struggle for independence in India. There were also others who came from similar background of secure family roots, extravagance and style, and who courted imprisonment, flirted with hardship and enjoyed the luxury of sacrifice.
  If Nehru was a romantic, a politician who was more a poet than a schemer, a revolutionary who loved to philosophise more than to operate, he was not the only one of that kind in (…)

• Nehru Legacy for Socialism

  16 November 2010

  by Puran Chandra Joshi
  Dr Arjun Sengupta’s article on ‘Nehru and Indian Socialism’ is full of new insights and understanding which deserve wide discussion among socialists in India.
  Dr Sengupta has made an important methodo-logical departure. He suggests that to judge Nehru’s contribution to socialism from the yardstick of “scientific socialism” would be a mistake. Indeed, this doctrinaire approach has for long been a source of great confusion and error. Nehru was significant not as a (…)

• An Open Letter to Sonia Gandhi

  16 November 2010, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Dear Madam Gandhi,
  It did not behove you to rubbish the Bihar Government in your election campaign there by flying in the face of facts. While to play up your party and play down others is both permissible and the done thing in election campaigns, a responsible leader of a responsible national party should not engage in Orwellian untruths and bad-mouth the government it wishes to replace.
  The last five years out of the 20 that you have branded as the time of misgovernance in Bihar (…)

• Obama: A President Under Siege

  16 November 2010, by Anil Rajimwale

  Some people compare Obama’s presidentship to President Roosevelt’s in the early 20th century, not Franklin Roosevelt of the Second World War fame, but Theodore before the First World War. But there are serious differences: during Roosevelt’s time finance monopoly in the US had begun to split off from the industrial monopoly capitalism. During Bush’s and Obama’s time, the financial empire has become too distanced from its industrial source, too domineering, necessitating calls for restoring (…)

• Dimensions of Mumbai’s Adarsh Scandal

  10 November 2010, by SC

  After the CWG scam the enormity of Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society scandal has struck a body blow to the principal ruling party at the Centre as it is running a coalition government headed by its apointee in Maharashtra and several of its bigwigs, including the CM, are found to be involved in it. But more than the politicians whose image in the public eye has fallen over the years, the fact that besides those associated with politics and the bureaucracy the names of several high-ranking (…)