Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Undercurrents of Kaimur

  1 March 2010, by Amarendra Kishore

  Blood-curdling screams, spine-chilling blood-bath and heart-rending mass killings—these are an integral part of life in the Kaimur hills of Rohtas district in Bihar. With untamed dense forests, rain-kissed lush vegetation, challenging terrain, gushing waterfalls, black and brown valley, the Kaimur hills of Bihar, once known as mini-Chambal, where governance and adminis-tration have already been strangled by the Red guerrillas, are vibrating with the booming of guns. About three dozen tribal (…)

• Australian Violence Jai Ho!

  1 March 2010, by T J S George

  One reason for the continuing attacks by White Australians on Brown Indians is the Australian Government’s refusal to take them seriously, let alone see racism in them. They don’t take it seriously because they don’t take India seriously. And they don’t see any racism because Australian racism is part of a rising tide of racism across the world.
  The ultra-Right British National Party has been gaining ground in local and national elections. It is true that these gains have been mostly (…)

• Terror Strikes at Pune and Silda

  22 February 2010, by SC

  The return of terror after a gap of 15 months (following the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008) has naturally caused consternation across the country: on February 13 a bomb blast ripped through Pune’s popular German Bakery, close to the Osho Ashram and diagonally across the Jewish Chabad House (which 26/11 suspect David Coleman Headley had earlier recced), initially killing nine persons, including three foreigners, and injuring 45 (among whom four were foreign nationals); (…)

• Right to Information versus Might of Disinformation

  22 February 2010, by Era Sezhiyan

  The sine qua non of a functioning democracy is free and fair elections of the representatives by an enlightened citizenry. However, conduct of free and fair elections depends more on having a free and fair electoral machinery, free from the influence and control of the executive and the party in power.
  When the Draft Article 289 on Elections was taken up for consideration on June 15 and 16, 1949 in the Constituent Assembly, several Members severely criticised the dangerous (…)

• Abuses of Biotechnology posing Threats to Survival

  22 February 2010, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  The following is the lucidest possible exposition of transgenic genetic engineering. There has been no other exposition anywhere with comparable lucidity of this intricate subject. Since this kind of engineering poses a threat to life’s survival on earth, it has become a crucial political issue. This article was published in Mainstream Annual 2001 (dated December 22, 2001). It is being reproduced here, with minor alternations
  by the author, in view of the latest controversy surrounding (…)

• 3 Idiots versus ‘Two Idiots’

  22 February 2010, by Braham Dutt

  The recent developments in Maharashtra are against the very spirit of our Constitution and unhealthy for the future of democracy in India. Both the senior and junior (Raj) Thackerays are competing with each other for their political survival and indulging in poisonous politics by playing regional, linguistic and religious cards, putting the unity and integrity of the nation in danger.
  Some time ago we saw North Indians being beaten black and blue by the Shiv Sainiks/MNS activists in (…)

• Bt Brinjal is Neither the Beginning Nor the End

  22 February 2010, by K Saradamoni

  A few days back, on January 26, 2010, we celebrated our sixtieth Republic Day, reminding us that we declared ourselves to be a sovereign Republic sixty years ago. We proclaimed that all people, living in this country, irrespective of religion, caste, gender, place of living would have freedom of opportunity. We told ourselves that ours would be a democratic country where freedom of faith or absence of it, right to live with dignity, to be treated as equal everywhere —place of worship, (…)

• Next Step in Land Reforms in the Context of UP

  22 February 2010, by Kripa Shankar

  The UP Zamindari Abolition Committee Report, which is supposed to be the most radical among such reports of other States where zamindari was abolished, was wholly opposed to any land redistribution despite the fact which it had noted that less than two per cent of the zamindars in UP owned nearly 58 per cent of the land. It had found that top 9000 zamindars owned above 100 acres of land each and that their Sir and Khudkast land alone constituted one-fourth of the agricultural land. Still the (…)

• Right to Food: Some Issues and Challenges: A Case Study of Kalahandi

  22 February 2010, by Suranjita Ray

  ”It is our ardent desire that not even a single citizen of India should ever go hungry …. It is also our national resolve to root out malnutrition from our country,” said the Prime Minister in his speech on August 15, 2009. This reinforces the pro-poor mandate of the government based on expansion and deepening of the inclusive growth and programme the most dramatic promise made is the proposal to enact a National Food Security Act, which promises every family below poverty line (BPL) in (…)

• Supreme Court of India or Supreme Court for Indians

  22 February 2010, by V R Krishna Iyer

  These two versions are radically different in principle and content. The Preamble of our current Constitution has inscribed its conscience that it pledges the people of India to Justice—Social, Economic, Cultural and Political India with a geo-political concept. Indians are humanist—a socio-economic idea, a collective value, emphatically, a crore or more of Indian humanity with a cultural legacy. A finer noble thought than a mere span of space, a terrain or land politically united by a (…)