Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• In Defence of Professor Lotika Sarkar

  2 April 2009

  Communication
  I am both an admirer and life subscriber of Mainstream (No. 1593). I am deeply touched and gratified to read the feeling of distress expressed by some of the justice-holders of our society in the March 21, 2009 issue of Mainstream: “In defence of Professor Lotika Sarkar”. I would like to join the signatories in supporting this cause, and would like to do whatever possible to get back the occupancy of the house to Professor Lotika Sarkar. I have known Lotika from 1948, when we (…)

• Obama’s USA

  2 April 2009, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Obama is certainly a new phenomenon for America in more honestly diagnosing the country’s major problems and bringing a change from the Bush policy—to change the diagnosis to suit favourite remedies.
  Security and democracy, two watch-words of her policy which should do honour and invest pride in any country if it honestly implements them, have earned her hostility and the ire of major chunks of the international community. The Americans, caught in a seemingly unending war with Iraq (…)

• Global Meltdown and its Impact on the Indian Economy

  2 April 2009, by Ruddar Datt

  With the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street icons, there was growing recession which affected the US, the European Union (EU) and Japan. This was the result of large scale defaults in the US housing market as the banks went on providing risky loans without adequate security and the repaying capacity of the borrower. The principal source of transmission of the crisis has been the real sector, generally referred to as the ‘Main Street’. This crisis engulfed the United States in (…)

• Coalition Politics and Impending Poll

  2 April 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The dragging-on of the Presidential talks with leaders of different political parties has no doubt exasperated the patience of the average citizen as much as the President himself. What has been found is that no political formation worth the name has been able to muster sufficient support to ensure a majority in the Lok Sabha.
  What we have to thank our stars about is the fact that the entire game of elections is played within the four corners of the Constitution which was written as (…)

• Global Democracy: Consolidation and Expansion

  2 April 2009, by Mubashir Hasan

  Global Democracy
  Democracy at any level—global, regional, national or at the level of communities—means, above all, peace and justice, filled stomachs, health, education, shelter; all regulated by an organisation in which citizens collectively regulate their political, social and economic affairs themselves in a manner that their individual freedoms are not restricted and liberty is enhanced.
  Peace requires resolution of disputes and differences in a just manner through (…)

• Communalism and Hate Speech

  2 April 2009, by Ambrose Pinto

  Ordinary terms used by ordinary people to express significant experiences can be turned into hate speech. The word “conversion”, for example, means a profound experience of personal or social transformation. For Ambedkar, conversions were a symbolic expression of protest against caste. In one of his public discourses, he had said that “though born a Hindu, he will never die as one”. His outbursts were primarily because of the personal and social trauma that he and his community had undergone (…)

• Why the US Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail

  2 April 2009, by David Harvey

  Much is to be gained by viewing the contem-porary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they (…)

• Working of NREGA — Voices from Panchayats

  2 April 2009, by Bidyut Mohanty

  Introduction
  Bureaucratic implementation of the NREGA has bypassed the Panchayati Raj Institutions which were intended to play an important role in planning and executing this flagship programme to respond to the local needs of the people. As a result several problems ranging from corruption to poor planning and the arbitrary management of the scheme have crippled the potentially valuable measure to provide sustenance to the rural poor. This was the tenor of the deliberations of some 1200 (…)

• Reflections on a Visit to Bangladesh

  2 April 2009, by Ranjan Gupta

  My father was a Bengali from East Bengal though he lived most of his life in Calcutta. After the age of ten I have never lived in Bengal and only visited it occasionally. It may sound exaggerated, a bit of a hyperbole, but on my first proper visit to Bangladesh recently I felt I had discovered my identity—what it means to be a Bengali and to be part of a larger Bengali culture. For one who speaks only a smattering of Bengali and had a non-Bengali mother, I never felt I was part of the (…)

• How do We React to Varun’s Outbursts?

  2 April 2009, by Chandra Sen

  Before the country gets into the real election mode, we, secular Indians of all persuasions, have been shocked into silence by the fulminations of young Varun Gandhi. Some veterans, in whose minds his father Sanjay’s deeds during the infamous Emergency still remain fresh, were quick to draw a parallel between the father and the son. However, for all his arbitrary use of extra-constitutional authority antagonising large segments of the people as also veteran political leaders and (…)