Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Rethinking Poverty: The Disputed Dividing Line

  10 November 2010, by Suranjita Ray

  The co-existence of widespread poverty with high economic growth during the last few years has concerned both policy-makers and academics to get back to what constitutes poverty and where to draw the line below which poverty can be estimated. The concept of poverty line or garibi rekha was introduced by the Planning Commission in the 1960s to identify the poor. It is based on the monetary value required to meet basic needs and is thus revised over the years.1 However, the dividing line is a (…)

• An Open Letter to Ten Per Cent India, Myself Included

  10 November 2010, by Badri Raina

  I
  The Commonwealth Games (CWG) are over. Our revels have ended for now. Many White people have gone satisfied; some even impressed. What might have been a bland and colourless event elsewhere was rendered magical as the hooded cobras put in an appearance to greet the visitors. In which other country would you have pressed Langurs into service to shoo off mere monkeys? You might say that the abiding world of Kipling rendered what might have been the anasthetised efficiency of gadgetry a (…)

• Future belongs to ‘Bolshevism’

  10 November 2010

  [(October Revolution: Ninetythird Anniversary
  Seventh November this year will be observed as the ninetythird anniversary of the historic October Revolution. Although the socio-economic system in Russia has been overturned and the once mighty USSR dismantled, the worldwide significance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 has not waned in the least; on the contrary its importance has been heightened in the light of the latest international events that bring out the sole surviving superpower’s (…)

• Evil as Spectator Sport

  10 November 2010, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  One Chief Minister, four days, two confidence votes. That certainly puts Karnataka in the history books. But the twin victories are more Pyrrhic than the one Pyrrhus won against the Romans at unsustainably high cost. They have merely proved John Kenneth Galbraith’s theory that television has turned politics into a spectator sport. Honourable Members assaulting security marshals and one honourable Member doing an honourable striptease standing on an honourable desk must have (…)

• Whither India: The Way Up or the Way Down?

  10 November 2010, by P K Chatterjee

  [(TRIBUTE
  Prabhat Kumar Chatterjee, eminent senior Supreme Court advocate, who passed away at his New Delhi residence in the morning of October 28, 2010, was born on October 10, 1922. His father, the late Rai Bahadur A.D. Chatterjee, was a member of the judicial service in Bihar. He completed his graduation from the Government College, Bhagalpur, and went on to do his Law from the Patna Law College. Subsequently he began his law practice in the Patna High Court before coming to Delhi and (…)

• Absorbing Narrative of a Community on the Move while being in Confrontation and Crisis

  10 November 2010, by Dipak Malik

  BOOK REVIEW
  The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among Banaras Weavers by Vasanthi Raman; Routledge, New Delhi; 2010; pages 384; Rs 795.
  The Warp and the Weft is a serious attempt in building blocs in study of ‘the invisible’ in the mainstream social science discourse. Admittedly the dominant group of watchers of Indian society invariably, because of the perception bias, seem to ignore questions of plurality embedded in the scene, where distinct identities of minorities (…)

• US in Afghanistan: A Catch-22 Situation

  10 November 2010, by Mansoor Ali

  The US strategy in Afghanistan is “unsustai-nable”, writes Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times. Why? Because, as he opines, “it is inadvertently financing its adversaries” while simultaneously “backing a corrupt government that drives people to the Taliban”—a kind of double-edged sword. In a way it reflects a lack of policy on the part of the Americans to meet the enormous challenge that the country (which has never been under alien domination and can never be subdued if past history (…)

• Wanted Substance, Not Rhetoric

  30 October 2010, by SC

  As the third phase of polling for the Bihar Assembly elections ends today, it is still not certain if Nitish Kumar would return to power at the head of the JD(U)-BJP combine though there appears to be unanimity on the opinion that he and his alliance have a distinct advantage over his adversaries, and former CM Laloo Prasad in particular.
  Meanwhile as the country and the Union Government get ready for the Obama visit in the first half of next month, the Union Home Secretary and US (…)

• How to Meet the Caste Challenge in Politics

  30 October 2010, by Chaturanan Mishra

  Caste-based regional political parties have come up because the Central Government did not address the problem of regional backwardness. Such regional parties may appear to give the impression of democracy reaching the people down below. But there is one big danger: such regional parties may lead to the balkanisation of the country if they turn into separatist movements as in Kashmir, the North-East region, Bodoland etc. The threat to national unity springing from this phenomenon should be (…)

• US Administration Beating Hasty Retreat

  30 October 2010, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The sudden accretion of tensions in the United States-Pakistan ties in recent days raises several questions. Most certainly, they were contrived tensions and they dissipated as quickly as they gathered. It all began with a dramatic jump in the US’ drone attacks in Waziristan in the most recent weeks.
  Actually, there has been a four-fold increase in September as compared to the average during the past six-month period. In a single month alone, the drones rained death and destruction 22 (…)