Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tribute to Subhas Chakraborty: A Maverick Communist with Mass Following

  19 August 2009, by Sumit Chakravartty

  The untimely death of Subhas Chakraborty, 68, West Bengal’s Minister for Transport, Sports and Youth Affairs, in Kolkata on August 3 has caused a genuine void in the State’s Left circles. A maverick Communist in every sense being unorthodox and independent-minded both in his utterances and his activities, he was a real people’s leader and this was testified by the unprecedented crowds that came out on the streets of the city during his last journey—the metropolis was literally plunged in (…)

• On Batla House and NHRC, Shopian Killings and Para-military Behaviour

  19 August 2009, by Humra Quraishi

  Several academics and activists together with legal experts have countered the NHRC report on the alleged encounter at Batla House. Space constraints will come in the way, so let me focus only on two such reports.
  One report is sent by Anhad’s Shabnam Hashmi:
  “On 20th May, the Delhi High Court, acting on a petition filed by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights and Anhad, had asked the National Human Rights Commission to conduct their own inqury into the alleged Batla House (…)

• Whither Information Technology in India?

  16 August 2009, by Sudeep Ray

  Sudeep Ray 58, a Marxist activist who happened to be the West Bengal State Committee member of the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) headed by former CPM MP Saifuddin Chowdhury, passed away in Kolkata on July 3 night after being involved in a road accident.
  Sudeep was a leader of the bank employees movement in West Bengal and was in the CPI for several years having been active in the students’ movement when one came in touch with him and forged a bond of fraternal intimacy. He like (…)

• Shocking and Shameful

  16 August 2009, by SC

  While film star Emraan Hashmi has openly come out conveying the fact that his being a Muslim has caused difficulties for him to purchase a flat in Mumbai and attributed this to the alleged anti-Muslim bias on the part of the cooperative society involved, another film star Shabana Azmi has disclosed similar problems she and her husband, celebrated lyricist Javed Akhtar, faced while hunting for a flat in the same metropolis—and ace film director Mahesh Bhatt has confirmed the prevalence of the (…)

• The Slum, the Dog and the Millionaire

  16 August 2009, by Dev N Pathak

  Carried away by the effect of the Oscared Slum Dog Millionaire (SDM) and tend to take its leitmotif for something eternal? Then Rolland Barthes was so very right. Bourgeoising myth redefines everything for a specific purpose and metamorphoses the mundane into extramundane, socio-cultural into natural, and temporal into eternal. Stretching a bit further, if it is a popular myth of our times, then the fascinating categories, the mythological icons, are the slum, the dog, and the millionaire. (…)

• An Eye-opener

  16 August 2009, by Shanthy Vadi

  The article “Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa’s ‘Final Resolution’” by M.K. Bhadrakumar (Mainstream, July 28, 2009) is an eye-opener for those who think that the only reason for the recent mass carnage on Tamils was the vanquished LTTE.
  As Bhadrakumar rightly put it, the region in the Indian Ocean has become a theatre for big-power rivalry.
  The present government of President Rajapaksa is the first to fully embrace the Sinhalese Buddhist ideology, suggesting that there is (…)

• Indian Communists versus Marxism-Leninism

  16 August 2009, by K G Somasekharan Nair

  The Congress is a bourgeois-democratic party. This perception is the spine of applied communist ideology in India. Since its commencement, all strategies and tactics adopted by the communist movement to make India red has been engineered by this immutable dogmatism. Hence the Communists dedicated their whole potency to put an end to the monopoly of the Congress in the freedom struggle and the administration thereafter. In partial dispensation of this historical mission, they propped up the (…)

• For a Legal Discussion on UI Number

  16 August 2009, by S G Vombatkere

  COMMUNICATION
  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIA) with Nandan Nilekani at its head is set to provide a unique number to all Indian citizens by 2011, at a cost estimated at Rs 150,000 crores, with an initial budgeted outlay of Rs 100 crores for the current year. Obtaining the UI Number is said to be not mandatory. Thus people who would want the UI Number but to whom there is little access because of living in remote areas, and people who are absent from their home when the (…)

• From Slavery to Debt-bondage: Two Centuries of Exploitation in India

  16 August 2009, by Sudhanshu Bhandari

  In human history, from the advent of advanced agrarian communities till the last quarter of the nineteenth century, slavery has been a part and parcel of most, if not all, human societies, and a most ubiquitous institution, with, of course, variations in the scale and intensity of exploitation. There have existed with various other forms of dependency such as villeinage, debt-bondage, pawnship but it was in slavery, that the worst forms of human exploitation and misery, the most blatant (…)

• Manmohan Singh breaks New Path in Indo-Pak Relations

  16 August 2009, by Sandeep Pandey

  This article is based on the author’s weeklong trip to and discussions in Pakistan last month. It is being published as a point of view.
  The worst fears of some of us have now been confirmed. Pakistani society, politicians and media have always been talking about the involvement of Indian intelligence agency RAW in fomenting trouble inside Pakistan. First it was in Sindh, particularly in Karachi. Now people say there is no doubt about Indian involvement in Balochistan and some say that the (…)