Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Karat versus Maoists: Total Advantage for the Fundamentalists

  2 September 2010, by Diptendra Raychaudhuri

  At last, Prakash Karat has gathered enough courage to call a spade a spade. At Vijaywada, where the CPI-M had a meeting of its extended Central Committee, he reportedly told his comrades that farmers’ land should not be taken without their consent. He admitted that Nandigram was a blot on a party’s face that thrived as a pro-poor pro-peasant party. It clearly shows that he wants to bring the lost Leftist sheen of his party back. What remains to be seen is whether he and his party changes (…)

• Faking an Encounter: Killing the Peace Process

  2 September 2010

  DOCUMENT
  The following is the preliminary report of the All India Fact Finding Team on the killing of Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and Hem Chandra Pandey. This was released to the media at Hyderabad on August 22, 2010.
  The Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisations (CDRO) put together a team of concerned citizens consisting of Prof Emeritus Amit Bahaduri, JNU, Delhi, Senior Counsel of Supreme Court Prashant Bhushan, Kavita Srivatsava, human Rights worker from Rajasthan, Gautam (…)

• Gopalaswamy Parthasarathi

  2 September 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  The month of August marks the death anniversaries of distinguished diplomat-administrator-educationist G. Parthasarathi and renowned journalist C.N. Chitta Ranjan (who, apart from being the Editor of National Herald, Assistant Editor of Patriot and Editor of Link, was the first Editor of this journal in 1962-63). Parthasarathi passed away in New Delhi on August 1, 1995 and Chitta Ranjan breathed his last in the Capital on August 2, 1990. Remembering them today, we are (…)

• Our First Editor

  2 September 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  It was in 1960-61 that I came to know Chitta Ranjan who was then working in The Hindustan Times. I had met him earlier in Madras where he was desperately trying to run a daily brought out by a working journalists’ cooperative. When that project folded up, Chitta Ranjan moved to Delhi.
  When we first met, he was a staunch Congressman, an ardent follower of Kamaraj. I was in search of a forum where there could be dialogue between Congress opinion and the Left, to start with; and then if the (…)

• Radhakrishnan as Statesman

  2 September 2010, by G. Parthasarthi

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had an integral view of the individual, society and the world community. This integral view was like a thread that ran through and held together his philosophy of education, of religion and social regeneration, and of the One World of the human family. He perceived the building of this One World as the challenge to statesmanship in the era after the Second World War and the advent of nuclear weaponry.
  One of the great teachers of our century, whose lectures and (…)

• For a New Frontier

  2 September 2010, by C.N. Chitta Ranjan

  Fifteen years have gone by and yet the Kashmir dispute has defied settlement. And today it has got entangled in a mass of other issues, ranging from defence against the Chinese menace to the securing of Western aid.
  The six rounds of ministerial level talks may have heard many a sophisticated proposal, pertaining to maps and alignments. They may have been accompanied by hectic back-stair—sometimes even frontporch—lobbyings by interested outsiders, but there was something severely missing (…)

• Growing Role of Defence Forces in Governance: An Invitation For Emergency

  2 September 2010, by S G Vombatkere

  At present, perhaps about one-third of available Army troops are deployed in counter-insurgency (CI) operations in Kashmir and the North-Eastern States. There is no question that government is empowered to call in the Army for the CI role, but this is taking its toll of both training and preparedness for its primary role of countering external threat and maintaining India’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. While the Army can be called to perform its secondary role of aid to civil power (…)

• Illegalitity of Vedanta’s Niyamgiri Mining Project is Well Established

  2 September 2010, by Bharat Dogra

  This article was written before the latest landmark decision of the Centre rejecting environmental clearance to the Vedanta group’s $ 1.7 billion bauxite mining project in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills with Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh citing serious violations of the Environment Protection Act 1966, Forest Counservation Act 1980 and Forest Rights Act 2006 by both the Orissa Government and Vedanta in this regard.
  The four-member committee headed by N.C. (…)

• 

  No End to the Injustice: Statement Of The Solidarity Committee For Burma’s Freedom Fighters

  2 September 2010

  (This statement was issued on July 20, 2010 but could not be carried earlier due to unavoidable reasons.)
  After more than twelve years of struggling to get justice in Indian courts 34 Burmese freedom fighters are still in prison even though the case in court has finished. The question is: why?
  The saga of the struggle of the 34 Burmese freedom fighters never caught the imagination of the media except in the beginning of their detention because these are men who have no faces. They are (…)

• US Clutches at Flood Relief Opportunities in Pakistan

  2 September 2010, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The humanitarian situation resulting from the unprecedented floods in Pakistan has been turned into a playground of regional geopolitics. The responsibility for this primarily lies with the United States, which fashioned its response to the crisis in a needlessly competitive spirit.
  The needs of Pakistan are of stupendous proportions. Even cold statistics bring this out. One-fifth of the landmass of Pakistan is inundated and the lives of 20 million people have been affected. Nothing (…)