Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Shopian Killings Don’t Stir Us!

  22 June 2009, by Humra Quraishi

  Ironies hit. On one hand you have women on top slots. President Pratibha Patil, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Women and Child Welfare Minister Krishna Tirath…the list is long. But just about pause here. And see what can happen to the ordinary woman of this land. She could be raped, murdered, tossed and flung about, and yet unaffected we’d sit.
  No, we are not crying hoarse even as details are trickling in that the two Kashmiri women of Shopian were indeed (…)

• From Employment Guarantee to National Food Security

  22 June 2009, by Sitaram Kumbhar

  The President of India Pratibha Patel, in her first address to the joint session of Parliament after 15th Lok Sabha election, said that the UPA Government would pass a legislation called the “National Food Security Act” (NFSA) which would entitle, by law, to every family below the the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas to 25 kg of rice or wheat a month at Rs 3 a kg. This is something historic. The NFSA will guarantee that cheap foodgrain is made available to those who can claim it. (…)

• Remembering E.M.S. Namboodiripad on his Birth Centenary

  22 June 2009, by SC

  More than eleven years have passed since E.M.S. Namboodiripad breathed his last in Thiruvananthapuram on March 19, 1998. Yet it seems as if it was only the other day that one walked into his room in the party office in the Capital for a refreshing conversation as one used to have with him and two of his party colleagues occupying leading positions in the CPI-M as Polit-Bureau members, B.T. Ranadive and M. Basavapunnaiah. They were the three stalwarts of the Indian communist movement, all of (…)

• Indian Left Today

  22 June 2009, by E.M.S. Namboodiripad

  Nineteen Eightyeight will go down in history as the year in which a widely current myth was exploded—the myth that the entire Opposition from the extreme Left to the extreme Right should be united in a single combination if the Congress is to be defeated. It is being increasingly recognised that there cannot be a single Opposition in which the Right and the Left segments are united.
  As late as a year ago, the Left was under attack (from the Centrist political leaders and from the (…)

• Comrade EMS - A Homage

  22 June 2009, by Ashok Mitra

  Tributes to E.M.S. Namboodripad
  Scholar extraordinary, Comrade EMS would hold his own in intense discussions on ideological, methodological and epistemological issues with close comrades as much as with foremost economists, historians and other social scientists. He would write tracts on both Marxist theory and on emerging aspects of what he described as the National Question. He would, simultaneously, compose documents, in English as well as Malayalam, on contemporary political issues, (…)

• The EMS I Admired

  22 June 2009, by Kuldip Nayar

  I was Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant’s Press Secretary when I saw E.M.S. Namboodiripad for the first time at the meeting of State Chief Ministers. He looked different from the rest. He wore a coloured bush shirt while they donned white khadi kurtas; they left him alone when they exchanged small talk between themselves.
  The agenda before the Chief Ministers was about the extension of Preventive Detention Act, a British measure which was used to pick up leaders to stall any movement (…)

• EMS on Planning

  22 June 2009, by Prabhat Patnaik

  Marxism, as is well-known, does not see ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ as two separate entities. The journey from the abstract to the concrete, from ‘theory’ to ‘praxis’ is as much a theoretical effort as an effort of praxis. E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s theoretical greatness therefore lay in the fact that he developed this theory-praxis totality in the context of rthe reality of the Indian society. And one very significant feature of this reality that he had to grapple with was that India was a planned (…)

• Poverty Syndrome: Various Facets

  22 June 2009, by Vinod Anand

  The literature review shows that poverty definitions currently used by various countries (especially developing) for administering their poverty programmes are inadequate, because very little research has been done in this area.
  In fact, it is not easy to have one uniform definition of poverty because there are a number of specific issues that are normally linked with poverty. These are:
  • the historical definitions of poverty;
  • the use of index numbers in the (…)

• Punjab: What Next?

  22 June 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  This month marked the twentyfifth anniversary of ‘Operation Bluestar’ that culminated in the liquidation of Jarnail Singh Bhindarwale in Amritsar’s Golden Temple but eventually led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi on the last day of October the same year. On this occasion we reproduce N.C.’s first reactions to the event in the ‘Editor’s Notebook’ of Mainstream (June 9, 1984).
  It is a sad commentary on the state of our Republic that the Army had to go in for a military operation to (…)

• Economic Crisis and Women: A Draft

  22 June 2009, by Devaki Jain

  Women’s World
  The recently generated turbulence in the global economy has not only drawn attention to various forms of distress, but also generated a flood of introspection on economic reasoning, and a flood of ideas on other ways of generating prosperity or, to put it in classical terms, building the wealth of nations.
  In this review what would be attempted is
  (1) to reveal, through a gathering of currently available literature, that there is clear difference between impact of (…)