Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tottering Britain and Partition

  25 October 2009, by P.K. Nigam

  To understand the correct history of India’s independence and partition, it is necessary to know Britain’s economic position after WW II. Churchill had said: “We are not fighting this war (and spending money) to lose our Empire.” Till the war end British politicians did not understand that though the empire was necessary for the British, they had no power left to rule it. Colonial Secretary Cranebourne (the grandson of Lord Salisbury) believed in 1942 that the “British Empire is not dead, it (…)

• Remembering Balagopal: A Feminist Pays Her Tribute To A Comrade

  25 October 2009, by Nandita Haksar

  TRIBUTE
  My first introduction to Balagopal was as a brilliant mathematician with a doctorate from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a lecturer at the Kakatiya University in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. Balagopal had to leave his job at the Kakatiya University because there was a danger that he would be killed by the police because he had been taking up the cause of the Naxalites.
  I could not help smile when I remembered our first meeting as lawyer and client and he had looked at the (…)

• K. Balagopal: A Memory to be Cherished

  25 October 2009, by V. Geetha

  TRIBUTE
  At first it seemed a huge, obscene lie, the news of his death. It did not seem possible—he had been busy as always the weekend before, at a human rights convention in Ananthapur, to mark 10 years of the Human Rights Forum, the organisation he and others started in 1998. That had become a pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts in the weekends, to enquire into rights violations—land grabbing by the state or private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous open (…)

• Edward Moore Kennedy—Defender of a Dream

  25 October 2009, by Sheel Bhadra Kumar

  TRIBUTE
  Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the legendary political patriarch of the most influential family of American politics and a man who knew huge privilege and terrible tragedy in near equal measure in his life, passed away on August 25, 2009 at his home in Hyannis post Massachusetts at the age of 77.
  His death signals the end of an era that held sway from the early 1960s. He was the youngest surviving brother of the four Kennedys. Edward Kennedy lived in the shadow of his (…)

• Indonesia Today: Post-Election Reassessment of the Military

  25 October 2009, by Navrekha Sharma

  The following article reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. However, in view of the undiminished validity of its contents, it is being published now. —Editor
  Indonesia’s second direct presidential election on July 8 took the country a step forward in consolidating the amazing democratic experiment it started 12 years ago. The financial crises of 1997, the end of 32 years of authoritarian rule under President Soeharto in 1998, the (…)

• Stop Offensive, Hold Unconditional Dialogue

  25 October 2009

  DOCUMENT
  The following is the resolution adopted at the National Convention of the Citizens Initiative for Peace held in the Capital on October 20, 2009. The convention was addressed, inter alia, by Justice P.B. Sawant, Prof Randhir Singh, Aruna Roy, Surendra Mohan, Prof G. Hargopal, Sandeep Pandey, Ajit Bhattacharjea, Prof Manoranjan Mohanty, as well as representatives from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orisssa, West Bengal; victims of state violence in Chhattisgarh also gave testimony of (…)

• Deserved Recognition for a Courageous Step

  17 October 2009, by SC

  Electioneering in Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh having come to an end, polling for the elections to the three State Assemblies took place today. According to preliminary information, there was moderate to heavy polling in the three States—whereas Maharashtra had the lowest turnout, that is, over 50 per cent, in Haryana the figure was 65 per cent while Arunachal Pradesh recorded the highest (72 per cent). The results are due on October 22.
  What is striking is that despite (…)

• Pakistan warns India to ‘Back Off’

  17 October 2009, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The Indian embassy in Kabul has been targeted for bomb attack for a second time in the past 15 months. At least 17 people were killed in the October 8 attack, when a car loaded with explosives rammed into the embassy’s compound wall.
  The Indian chancery is not far from the presidential palace and, ironically enough, just across the road from the Afghan Interior Ministry. Needless to say, the Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack, have shown they have the capacity to (…)

• What has Driven the Tribals of Central India to Political Extremism?

  17 October 2009, by B K Roy Burman

  According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 125 districts spread over nine States in Central India and adjoining areas have come under the influence of Left radical groups, loosely called Naxalites. On June 22, 2009, the Government of India has declared the most important among the Naxalite groups, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), as a terrorist organisation and banned it.
  The precursors of the present phase of Naxal activities first surfaced in Naxalbari of (…)

• Tagore and Victoria Ocampo

  17 October 2009, by K. Natwar Singh

  Earlier in the week The Asian Age carried a news item about a film being made on the Rabindranath Tagore-Victoria Ocampo friendship. I doubt if the name Ocampo is known to many in India today. Tagore too is a distant memory.
  The film, Thinking of Him, is to be a joint Indian-Argentinian venture about the ‘Tagore-Ocampo Love Story’. It is to be directed by the Argentine film director, Pablo Cesar, who will be in India next week. He is coming with the Argentinian President, Cristina (…)