Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• On Thermonuclear Weapon Capability and its Implications for Credible Minimum Deterrence

  26 December 2009

  Soon after the Pokhran-II tests on May 11 1998, the scientists of the two organisations concerned, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Defence R&D Organisation (DRDO), had jointly evaluated the success of the two tests—the fission device (A-bomb) and the fusion device (H-bomb). While the former device performed perfectly including creating a crater of the expected size, the fusion device failed on many counts—very low yield, no crater etc. International monitoring centres (…)

• Bangladesh: Promise of Change

  26 December 2009, by Kamal Hossain

  Citizens of Bangladesh have persevered in their effort to establish a working democracy. The movement to restore democracy had resulted in 1990 in an agreed commitment amongst all political forces to restore parliamentary democracy and to strengthen democratic institutions—the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a media committed fearlessly to truth and to give voice to the people. These aspirations for a transparent, responsive and accountable mode of governance were powerfully (…)

• Evolve Alternative Paradigm of Economic Growth

  26 December 2009, by M.B. Naqvi

  On November 7, 2009, veteran Pakistani journalist-cum-writer Mohammad Baqir Naqvi passed away in a Karachi hospital. Naqvi sahb was a prominent peace activist and crusader against nuclearisation of the Indo-Pak subcontinent. At the time of his death at the age of 81 he was busy writing a book on the Pakistan’s nuclear programme and foreign policy; the work, however, remains unfinished.
  Born in Amroha in 1928 he, like countless Muslims, migrated to Pakistan after partition in 1947. He (…)

• Needed: India’s Positive Role for Universal Nuclear Disarmament

  26 December 2009, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  Recently the DRDO’s former senior scientist, Dr K. Santhanam, raised a controversy that the Pokhran-II test for thermonuclear device was unsuccessful and that fresh nuclear tests were necessary to face the threat from China. Two former Chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr P.K. Iyenger and Dr Homi Sethna, supported his contention. Whether Pokhran-II was successful or not is a question of science and technology. But whether fresh nuclear tests are necessary to meet the defence needs is (…)

• Changing Weather and Shifting Glaciers: Deeper Ecological Concerns

  26 December 2009, by Chandra Mohan Bhandari

  Intellect, will and emotion, the powers of head, chest and heart with whom man as a conscious being has been endowed, will prove his undoing if, caught in the net of his concepts, in the brilliance of his achievements and in the web of his entanglements he forgets his anchorage in the weaving and working of the greater life.
  —Karlfried Graf von Durkheim
  Deeper ecological concerns and possible remedial measures need more than patchwork solutions. The thesis that it would be futile to (…)

• Justice Liberhan Report: Half-Truthful and Half-Untold

  26 December 2009, by Syed Shahabuddin

  Historians will indeed take a poor view of the national leadership in the critical days of 1992: a Prime Minister who was either naïve or incompetent and least interested in performing his constitutional and legal duties; an Opposition leader, who was, to say the least, a hypocrite, who had conceptualised and mobilised the people through his Rath Yatra and incited their fanaticism and then called December 6 the saddest day of his life; a senior colleague of his who was not only a (…)

• The Babri Controversey and Liberhan Report

  26 December 2009, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Seventeen years after the Babri tragedy occurred, the Liberhan Report seems a bit of an anachronism and almost an unnecessaary irritant. The broad contours of the tragedly are no revelation to the country, the tragedy having been already deeply mourned as a fall from the country’s centuries’ long sanity or acclaimed as a grand assertion of Hindu valour and triumph over the minority abuse and desecration of the Hindu places of worship or sentiments which were subjects of or defeated by Muslim (…)

• On the Liberhan Commission

  26 December 2009, by Mukul Dube

  It has long been held that justice delayed is justice denied. The 16.5 years that the Liberhan Commission took to produce its report on the Babri Masjid demolition must, in that light, be called a travesty of justice. Why might it have taken so much longer than the three months it was allotted when it was appointed by the government of Narasimha Rao?
  One reason that the Commission itself offered was that witnesses delayed making their appearances before it. It is entirely possible (…)

• A Wall Collapses, the World Changes

  26 December 2009, by T J S George

  Our press and patriots made quite a splash to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s tragic death. As it happened, it was also, to significant sections among us, the 25th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. So the controversies will go on, the accusations not blunting the justifications. The violations of the time were as heinous as the loyalties were blind.
  In the hurly-burly of the Indira Gandhi emotions, we barely noticed the 20th anniversary of an event (…)

• Eastern Europe: Impressions of a Journey

  26 December 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall (that took place last month) we reproduce here N.C.’s impressions following his visit to Eastern Europe shortly after that momentous development. These appeared in two parts in the issues of Mainstream dated February 17, 1990 and February 24, 1990. Even after twenty years these impressions remain invaluable for anyone trying to analyse the events of 1989 that changed the face of Europe as well as the world at (…)