Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Rabindranath versus Tagore

  10 June 2010, by Amiya Dev

  Are Rabindranath and Tagore the same phenomenon? It may sound absurd, but it is not always that when we talk of Tagore we are also talking of Rabindranath, and vice versa. Years ago an eminent professor of English from another part of India asked me in confidence: is Tagore really that great? This was a decade after his birth centenary. When I answered him, I wasn’t telling him of Tagore, but Rabindranath. Maybe it was from around that time that a non-Bengali Indian friend of mine, not sworn (…)

• Silence of the Lambs?: Why The RSS Wants To Forget Pracharak Sunil Joshi’s Murder

  10 June 2010, by Subhash Gatade

  It was a murder of an old activist, which the RSS would love to forget. It is a different matter that despite the innumerable ways in which it has tried to banish the memory of the whole incident it has found it very difficult to get away with it. And with the latest exposures in the Ajmer Dargah bomb blast case the whole issue has once again returned to haunt it.
  A former RSS pracharak, who was an accused in the murder of a Congress leader and his son, was shot dead in Dewas town, about (…)

• In Defence of N.D. Pancholi’s Legal Representation of Mohammad Afzal Guru

  10 June 2010

  The following is a press statement issued on May 28, 2010.
  We, the undersigned, are very disturbed by the recent controversy that has been generated in the media on the issue of legal representation of Mohammad Afzal Guru. An NGO, the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, in a letter to the media signed by its office-bearers, Gurusharan Singh, S.A.R. Geelani, Amit Bhattacharyya and Rona Wilson, has claimed that Mr N.D. Pancholi “was never at any point the counsel of Mr Afzal (…)

• Snapshots of Global and Internal Politics on May 23 and May 24, 2010

  10 June 2010, by Rakesh Gupta

  Germans sign the Eurozone package in the context of the Greece bail-out and the German leader visits German soldiers in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton is in China to talk to China about the US’ relations with it. The US renews its agreement with Japan over its military base and fumes against North Korea’s hostile act against South Korea, while Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchange fire at the border near the Poonch area. The Afghans are in conclave with the not-very-insignificant Afghan (…)

• Have You Looked at Barsa Lakhma’s Face?

  10 June 2010, by Nirmalangshu Mukherji

  The Hindu, May 25, posted the photograph of a person in its frontpage under the head “Six Naxals held for Dantewada massacre”, http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/25/stories/20100525 62010100.htm
  The person, Barsa Lakhma, is alleged to be a Naxal “leader”, a “commander” who is said to be involved in the gunning down of 76 security personnel. He along with five others—Oyam Hidma, Podiyami Hidma, Kawasi Budra, Oya Ganga, and Dura Joga—are in police custody after a “major breakthrough”.
  Take a (…)

• Relevance of the Caste-based Census

  10 June 2010, by Dilip Chavan

  India is gearing up its decennial census now. The present opposition to the caste-based census has a long lineage. G.S. Ghurye, one of the pioneers of Indian Sociology, had, way back in 1932, criticised the colonial practice of the caste-based census and the consequent politicisation of caste. He also attributed the origin of caste-based reservation to this politicisation and recorded his disapproval to the idea of caste-based reservation.
  Caste in India is increasingly seen as an obscure (…)

• Missing Elements in the Union Home Minister’s New Security Architecture

  10 June 2010, by K S Subramanian

  As a former IPS officer with experience of working in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Union Home ministry for many years and author of two recent books on the Indian police, I have read with interest the IB centenary endowment lecture, titled “A New Architecture for India’s Security”, delivered by the Union Home Minister on December 23, 2009. The lecture lacks credibility and carries no conviction because it ignores the long history and present predicament of the Indian Police, which (…)

• Why Naxalism?

  10 June 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  This article was written by N.C. forty years ago as ‘Observer’ in Mainstream (May 2, 1970) at the height of the first wave of the Naxalite movement. The spate of terrorist violence in West Bengal has pin-pointed public attention on what has come to be known as the Naxalite problem. Many so-called specialists on communism have aired very profound views on the nature of this phenomenon and have not hesitated to deliver homilies on how to deal with it.
  The Union Home (…)

• The Contrast

  1 June 2010, by SC

  In between the country’s most tragic air accident in a decade at the Mangalore airport in the early hours of May 22 and the former Haryana DGP, S.P.S. Rathore, being sent to jail following his sentence to one-and-a-half years behind bars on May 25 (20 years after he had molested 14-year-old Ruchika Girhotra forcing her to commit suicide when he dodged the judicial system by misusing his office and intimidatory tactics) came the Prime Minister’s first fully-publicised press conference since (…)

• Afghanistan: The New Game-plan

  1 June 2010, by Mansoor Ali

  It is quite a well-known fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Americans are at odds with one another. Rumours are rapidly spreading with effortless ease that US President Barack Obama dislikes Karzai and his distaste for the latter is growing. As a consequence Karzai is becoming defiant and even promising to join the Taliban and carry out unspeakable acts to defend the honour and independence of the Afghan fatherland. However, at the same time behind-the-scenes the US authorities (…)