Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Letter to the President

  18 February 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The following is the text of the letter that the Editor of Mainstream sent to the President of India twenty years ago on January 27, 1990 detailing the reasons for his inability to accept the Padma Bhushan award conferred on him on the Republic Day that year. We are reproducing the letter in the wake of the latest raging controversy over the Padma award being conferred on an NRI businessman.
  Nikhil Chakravartty,
  Editor Mainstream
  35 Kaka Nagar
  New Delhi -11000
  January 27, 1990
  To (…)

• Warning Note from the Past

  8 February 2010, by SC

  Sixty years ago in a message to the nation on the occasion of India becoming a Republic, our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was aptly described as the architect of modern India, conveyed the following warning note:
  We are fortunate to witness the emergence of the Republic of India and our successors may well envy us this day; but fortune is a hostage which has to be zealously guarded by our own good work and which has a tendency to slip away if we slacken in our efforts or if (…)

• Happy New Year? For Whom?

  8 February 2010, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  There’s a brand new addition to our National Register of Shame. The law has been amended to allow free air travel, business class, to “any number of companions and relatives” of Ministers. MPs were already enjoying this obscene privilege, but not Ministers. The latest amendment is “to remove this discrepancy”.
  Of course, there was a more decent way to end that discrepancy—by scrapping the undeserved charity given to MPs. But such thoughts do not occur to netas and babus (…)

• Netaji on Our Freedom Struggle and India after Independence

  8 February 2010

  On the occasion of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s 113th birth annivarsary on January 23 this year we offer our homage to the memory of that indomitable freedom figher by reproducing excerpts from his speeches and writings.
  This is Subhas Chandra Bose speaking to you over the Azad Hind Radio.
  For about a year I have waited in silence and patience for the march of events and now that the hour has struck, I come forward to speak.
  The fall of Singapore means the collapse of the (…)

• Lead, kindly Light....

  8 February 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Every year we dutifully go through the ritual of offering homage to Gandhiji on the day of his martyrdom.
  We shall once again be witnessing the ceremony on January 30 to be conducted as per protocol—early morning prayer at Rajghat, singing of bhajans and hymns, a round of spinning and then during the course of the day, meetings and seminars and a special programme on Doordarshan to remind us of the Father of the Nation. VVIPs encircled by gun-totting security guards will do the round (…)

• Towards Violent Uprising?

  8 February 2010

  COMMUNICATION
  What is new about the presence of a few policemen at the new year party toasted by an NCP politician, allegedly for and on behalf of an underworld don? The fact that many politicians, and quite a few men in khaki, have always had nexus with the gangsters is known to everyone. It has always been a symbiotic existence. Have elections not been financed by the underworld? Not much harm will be done to the erring policemen, because they will be shielded by their guardians, and (…)

• Tiibute to Jyoti Basu

  8 February 2010

  TRIBUTE
  Jyoti Basu is no more. After 17 days of valiant struggle (that first began when he was hospitalised on New Year’s Day having been struck by a bout of pneumonia) he finally succumbed to multi-organ failure and breathed his last at 11.47 am on January 17, 2010. On July 8 last year the former West Bengal CM—the longest-serving head of any State Government in independent India—had completed 95 years in age.
  More than 28 years ago when one of Jyoti Basu’s closest (…)

• In Rammanohar Lohia’s Birth Centenary Year - Removing the Cobwebs

  8 February 2010, by Surendra Mohan

  Among the radical and progressive sections which have carried or inherited the legacy of the Nehruvian consensus, the name of Dr Rammanohar Lohia is synonymous with an anti-Nehru and anti-Indira Gandhi obsessed mindset. This personal angle is then transferred to the ideological plane and these sections associate Lohia with the opposites of the elements of that consensus.
  This entire understanding is, however, deeply flawed and contrary to facts. Its dismisses, as if with a wave of (…)

• PM Should Rethink

  8 February 2010, by Chaturanan Mishra

  On the foundation day of the Indian National Congress the Prime Minister said that terrorism, communalism, Naxalism and regionalism were the major challenges before the nation. He forgot that the corrupt and anti-people administration is the main cause behind those challenges. After the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001 the USA took measures and that is why no second attack became possible. India, on the contrary, has had to face repeated terror attacks. (…)

• Issue of Organisation of States in India

  8 February 2010, by P R Dubhashi

  The December 9, 2009 midnight announcement by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram that the constitutional process will start for the creation of the new State of Telangana literally stirred a hornets’ nest in Andhra Pradesh, while it opened up a Pandora’s box in the rest of the country. While the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, Chandrashekhar Rao, broke his fast leading to the restoration of calm in the Telangana region, it evoked an immediate virulent reaction in the Andhra region (…)