Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Remembering Rammanohar Lohia

  20 March 2010, by Pritish Acharya

  Between March 2009 and March 2010 Rammanohar Lohia’s (March 23, 1910-October 12, 1967) birth centenary has been celebrated across the country. Many meetings and seminars, yatras and padyatras have been organised and quite a few writings on him published. Without being noticed by the ‘national’ media, many of these celebrations and publications were outside Delhi and not in English. One such, the Sapta Kranti Vichar Yatra consisting of 25 youths, was started from Maharashtra in August 2009, (…)

• Lohia and Empowerment of Women

  20 March 2010, by Radha Ojha

  Empowerment is a continuous process. It realises the ideals of equality, human liberation and freedom for all. Women’s empowerment implies equality of opportunity and equity between genders, ethnic groups, social classes and age-groups, strengthening the life chances of collective participation in different spheres of life. Power is not a commodity to be transacted nor can it be given away as alms. Power has to be acquired and it needs to be exercised.1 Activists want the government to (…)

• Samajwadi Party at Crossroads

  20 March 2010, by Varughese George

  Finally Amar Singh is out. He has been expelled from the Samajwadi Party on February 2 along with the Member of Parliament, Jayaprada. Yet the parting of ways by Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh is not merely personal, but has organisational and ideological dimensions too. The Samajwadi Party has been losing the elections since 2007 when it had to bow out of power in UP giving way to the BSP. In the 15th Lok Sabha elections in 2009 the party had to be satisfied with half the seats compared to (…)

• The Third Position: Non-alignment with Violence

  20 March 2010, by Sudhir Vombatkere

  McCarthyism in India
  In a charge sheet against Kobad Gandhi produced by the Delhi Police in the Tees Hazari Courts, New Delhi, on February 18, 2010, besides naming some other individuals, some organisations —like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)—are named. Much like McCarthyism in the USA several decades ago, in the present circumstances in India, governments may treat members of the PUCL and PUDR as members, collaborators or (…)

• Jyoti Basu’s Bombshell

  20 March 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  [From N.C.’s Writings
  Two months have passed since Jyoti Basu breathed his last in Kolkata on January 17, 2010. We once again remember the CPM patriarch by reproducing N.C.’s following article which appeared in Mainstream (January 18, 1997) bringing out the issues that were thrown up by Jyoti Basu’s press interview that was published on Janaury 1, 1997 and came as a bombshell within the CPM due to his open criticism of the party leadership for rejecting the idea of Basu becoming the (…)

• India’s Role in Afghanistan irks Pak

  20 March 2010, by Sushil Vakil

  The recent developments in the region give enough indications that Pakistan is desperate over the growing influence of India in Afghani-stan. After failing to garner international support on opening dialogue with the Taliban the country is now resorting to attack Indians working across the war-ravaged country through its ISI and Islamic fundamentalists—the Taliban and Al- Qaeda.
  There have been more than three attacks on Indians and Indian installations in Afghanistan during the last (…)

• Real Threat of Civil War

  20 March 2010, by Alka Tyagi

  BOOK REVIEW
  Making India Work by William Nanda Bissel; Penguin,Viking, New Delhi; 2009.
  William Nanda Bissell’s illustrious work, Making India Work, is the work of a diligent intellectual, a corporate head, a social thinker and, above all, a visionary.
  William Bissell is talking about the present socio-political situation, the poverty and environmental hazards that are threatening India. He invokes every Indian to wake up and work for an immediate change in the current (…)

• Surrogacy in India: A Thorny Issue

  20 March 2010, by Namita Singh Jamwal

  Surrogate motherhood—an arrangement in which a woman carries and bears a child for another person or persons, but takes no ownership of the child born—has raised moral, ethical, social and legal questions about both—the woman and the ‘commissioned baby’. The practice of renting a womb and getting a child is like outsourcing pregnancy. The business volume of this trade is estimated to be around $ 500 million and the numbers of cases of surrogacy are believed to be increasing at a galloping (…)

• Rajya Sabha Creates History

  19 March 2010, by SC

  For all the opposition from a vocal and recalcitrant minority within Parliament and certain sections of informed opinion outside, the passage of the Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill in the Rajya Sabha on March 9 by a landslide (186-1)—after the vociferous opponents seeking to hold the Upper House to ransom with their unprecedented actions (setting a record of sorts in unruly behaviour within the precincts of the Council of States) had been evicted and the BSP members also walked out—was (…)

• Wider Lessons of Shiv Sena’s Latest Mumbai Experience

  19 March 2010, by Balraj Puri

  The setback that the parochial form of Maharashtrian regionalism has recently received may result in revival of the progressive potentialities that regional nationalism had once displayed. Its experience is of wider relevance in other parts of the country also and needs a more thorough debate than has taken so far. First, let us recall what happened in Mumbai.
  The overwhelming response of the Mumbaikars to My Name Is Khan in defiance of the Shiv Sena’s call for the boycott of the (…)