Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Two Views on India-China Relations

  1 May 2010, by Harish Chandola

  The language used to describe India-China bilateral relations by the media of the two countries is so very different that one sometimes wonders if they are talking of the same thing. The Indian media has been suggesting that whatever activities China was conducting around were dangerous and detrimental to India. For instance, the recent Chinese hint of wanting to open bases overseas has been interpreted in India as its desire to set them up in Pakistan, to encircle and threaten India. (…)

• Social Networking: Affecting Productivity in India

  1 May 2010, by Mithun Dey

  Facebook is becoming a problem for employers at offices in India, as employees have started spending so much time on the social networking site that it is beginning to affect productivity, a new survey has revealed. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) have found in their survey that office staffs on average spend an hour a day on sites like Facebook, resulting in a loss of productivity measuring 12.5 per cent.
  The study noted: “Close to 12.5 per cent of (…)

• Lenin

  26 April 2010, by Jawaharlal Nehru

  Remembering Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on his one hundred and fortieth birth anniversary on April 22, 2010, we are reproducing excerpts from the following article by Jawaharlal Nehru that appeared in The Hindu (April 5, 1928).
  ‘I know a pair of eyes which have been for ever numbed by the burning sorrow of the Terror,’ said Gorky of Lenin. This sorrow did not leave him to the end. It made him a fierce fanatic and gave him the strength of will to persevere and achieve. But sorrow for the (…)

• In the Interest of Transparency

  24 April 2010, by SC

  What was anticipated for quite sometime eventually happened with Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor tendering his resignation from the Union Council of Ministers on April 18 and the PM accepting it. Earlier on the same day Sunanda Pushkar, the business-woman friend of Tharoor based in Dubai, surrendered her Rs 70-crore ‘sweat equity’ in Rendezvous Sports World, the IPL franchisee for Kochi; this she did to save her friend and absolve Tharoor of the charge that he had (…)

• Protect Tribal People, Rework Strategy to Tackle Maoism

  24 April 2010, by D Raja

  The following is the speech CPI leader D.Raja delivered in the Rajya Sabha on April 15 on the Maoist attack on the CRPF’s 62nd Battalion in Chhattisgarh, Dantewada.
  Mr Deputy Chairman, sir, at the outset, my Party, the Communist Party of India, condemns the killings of CRPF jawans in the strongest possible terms. My party extends its sympathies to the kith and kin of those victims. Sir, the Home Minister’s statement is a specific statement on the incident in Chhattisgarh. I want to be very (…)

• In Resurrection of Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama

  24 April 2010, by Arup Maharatna

  Indisputably enough, India on many a count was a distinguished colony of the British empire. While courting colonial domination over a fairly long span, India—unlike its many peers (for example, the African countries)—happened to have an illustrious heritage of a long-settled civilisation, with a complex social structure and organisation, culture, and religion. Ironically, India’s distinction on this score proved eventually more of a curse as it turned, in the course of a long indirect and (…)

• India and Iran’s Afpak Policy

  24 April 2010, by Atul Aneja

  Iran’s recent hyper-activism in neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan has caused conster-nation in large parts of the globe. In media circles, think-tanks and world chanceries, highbrowed mandarins and their well-heeled affiliates are trying to make sense of the latest, seemingly inscrutable, piece of the Persian puzzle.
  Yet Iran’s deft moves in an area the Persians have known well for thousands of years originate from deeply deliberated and well-grounded funda-mentals. Ever since (…)

• Other Dimensions of the Women’s Reservation Bill

  24 April 2010, by Syed Shahabuddin

  The continuing debate on the proposed reservation for women in legislatures through a constitutional amendment has raised much froth and fury on both sides of the political fence but has left out many conceptual, constitutional and social aspects unattended.
  In Article 15(1) of the Constitution any discrimination on the ground of sex alone is prohibited and the proposal is prima facie a blatant violation of this mandate. It may be argued that the raison d’etre of the proposed (…)

• Women’s Reservation Bill

  24 April 2010, by Vijay Kumar

  The 108th Amendment of the Constitution, better known as the Women’s Reservation Bill mandating one-third reservation in favour of women, avowedly for ensuring their adequate representation in highest legislative/ deliberating body at federal/state level and thereby empowering women, has been passed in the Rajya Sabha with just one vote against it. The object is undoubtedly wholesome and yet critical scrutiny will not be out of place to ascertain whether this Bill will readily lead to (…)

• Experiencing the Indian Democratic State

  24 April 2010, by Suranjita Ray

  Institutional Democracy
  A conceptual understanding of the democratic state often distinguishes it from other forms of non-democratic/absolutist/feudal aristocracy institutions. By displacing monarchical sovereignty with popular sovereignty the democratic state champions the cause of public interest based on the basic principles of equality, liberty, rights, freedom and justice, enshrined in the Constitution. To strengthen democracy and its functioning further, procedural methods are (…)