Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

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  Communal Violence in Orissa

  23 September 2008, by Sabita Sahu

  Orissa is in the grip of communal violence. It is shameful that the noble name of religion has been used to kill innocent people. It is alleged that Christian missionaries have been converting people in several parts of the State. Those who do so are the self-proclaimed guardians of Hinduism. They have been spreading the falsehood that the rate at which conversion is taking place will eventually endanger Hinduism. They apprehend that rise in number of Christians will imperil national unity. (…)

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  Inscrutable Chinese Behaviour at NSG Meet in Vienna

  23 September 2008, by Siddharth Varadarajan

  Disputing official Chinese accounts of Beijing having played a “constructive” role in the recent Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting on India, diplomats from several NSG states say China stood by the handful of countries resisting approval of the India waiver and only backed off when it saw the opposition melt away on the morning of September 6.
  At the same time, some diplomats questioned the suggestion that China was out to block the deal, with one European envoy who took part in the (…)

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  Turkmen Gas Pipeline : Hurdles Galore

  23 September 2008, by Mansoor Ali

  Energy experts of the NB Central Asia Agency are of the opinion that execution of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project still looks quite doubtful, since the pipeline has to pass through war-ravaged Afghanistan yet highly unsettled and in the throes of instability. There are other impediments as well, and these include the lack of confidence in the existence of sufficient quantity of gas to ensure the project’s viability and profitability as also the difficulties (…)

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  Moral Victory for Evicted Peasantry

  18 September 2008, by SC

  Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee characterised the accord reached late at night on Sunday (September 7) between the West Bengal State Government on the one hand and the agitators in Singur calling for land-for-land rehabilitation of those peasants evicted by the Tata Motors’ Nano car plant on the fertile soil of the area on the other as a ‘moral victory’ of the movement launched for the protection of Maa, Maati o Manush (that is, the Mother, the Soil and the People). Ever since she (…)

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  Flood Havoc by Kosi River in Bihar

  18 September 2008, by Chaturanan Mishra

  North Bihar has floods every year and therefore there is a feeling that this year too it is largely the same as before even as the floods this time have devastated 16 districts, badly affecting some four million people. But this is not the case. The present Kosi flood reminds one of the floods before 1955 when the eastern Kosi embankment was not there and the Kosi was flowing in the natural manner causing heavy damages. It is a river which has a character of heavy erosion and thus changing (…)

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  Guns Versus Bread

  18 September 2008, by Bharat Dogra

  While the proliferation of arms has proved costly everywhere in terms of the increased risk to human lives, this cost has been the highest in communities already burdened heavily with poverty and denial of basic needs. As a recent report by Amnesty International and other leading NGOs titled ‘Guns or Growth’ said:
  The impact of the misuse of small arms is felt across the world, but most keenly in poor countries. In these countries, the infrastructure required to cope with the impact of (…)

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  Short-term and Long-term Causes of Popular Uprising in J&K

  18 September 2008, by Balraj Puri

  The Jammu and Kashmir State is passing through an unprecedented popular upsurge, for the first time simultaneously in its two main regions, though in divergent directions.
  Apparently, the cause of this upsurge is difference over government land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. It did provide a flash- point to the simmering volcano that already existed.
  In Kashmir militants and separatists were providing an outlet to the sense of alienation. Suddenly both declined, partly due to the (…)

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  Kashmir and Conscience

  18 September 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  In the brochures and posters of Indian tourism, Kashmir still figures with its enchanting attractions. In reality, however, the picturesque Valley of Kashmir is becoming out of bounds for the peace-loving citizens of this country.
  In a sense, Kashmir today represents the gravest challenge to Indian democracy—perhaps much more than what happened at Ayodhya on December 6 and all that followed. If the bomb blast in Bombay on March 12 and the blow-up of the bomb storage in Calcutta that came (…)

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  Face of Deception and Betrayal

  18 September 2008, by Satish Chandra

  The UPA Government’s deception of the Indian people on the nuclear deal has been clearly exposed in the answers provided by the US State Department, on January 16, 2008, to the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in response to the queries posed by the latter on October 5, 2007. These responses were made public only on September 2, 2008 and had been kept under wraps so far at the request of the State Department as they were considered “diplomatically sensitive”. It does not take (…)

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  Manmohan Outsources Political Sovereignty

  18 September 2008, by Sandhya Jain

  Some things are scandalously evident in the current nuclear tamasha in the Capital, even to a non-specialist like this writer.
  One, the drama over India getting the so-called waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group was totally engineered by the West. The purpose was to heighten tensions in New Delhi and make it agree to script changes which would not be taken to the Union Cabinet, the Parliament where votes had to be purchased for the government to survive July 22 in order to clinch the (…)