Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

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  The Rising and Retribution in 1857

  10 September 2008

  Jawaharlal Nehru writing in 1932 on ‘The Great Revolt of 1857’, emphasised that many an English officer exceeded barbarity a hundred fold. If mobs of mutinous Indian soldiers, without officers or leaders, had been guilty of cruel and revolting deeds, the trained British soldiers led by their officers, exceeded them in cruelty and barbarity. Our perverted histories tell us a lot about the treachery and cruelty on the Indian side and hardly mention the other side.1
  Karl Marx had also noted (…)

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  Urban Terrorism on Maharashtra

  10 September 2008, by Ashok Kumar Sahay, Kshirod Chandra Patra

  The toll of urban terrorism has so far caused a loss of 30,000 innocent Indian lives in the last 13 years due to 33 serial blasts in Maharashtra. The end of terrorist violence is nowhere in sight. As things stand, in the coming days India in general and urban areas in particular would have to brace up for more deadly terrorist attacks. The intentions of the terrorists are clear, as their capacity for deadly strikes has demonstrated. Unless some out-of-box surgical response is worked out, the (…)

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  Bravo! Mr Speaker, Sir

  10 September 2008, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  The nation watched with horror the shenanigans in the Lok Sabha on July 21-22, 2008 during the debate on the motion seeking confidence on the Union Council of Ministers. For two long days it was an agony for any intelligent and informed citizen of the country to watch the performance, nay, antics verging on buffoonery of our members of Lok Sabha, desecrating our temple of democracy and converting into an arena of tomfoolery and horse trade of an ugly variety.
  The subject matter was the (…)

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  National Family Health Survey III, Punjab: A Brief Account

  10 September 2008, by Shaik Iftikhar Ahmed

  Introduction
  THE National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2005-06 provides information on fertility, family planning, health, nutrition, health care, HIV/AIDS and women’s empowerment. This survey is the third in the series. The earlier two were conducted in 1992-93 and 1998-99. These were coordinated by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) under the stewardship of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW). The preliminary findings of the National (…)

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  Imperative of Strengthening Democracy

  3 September 2008, by SC

  With the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as the head of state there was a new opportunity in Pakistan to strengthen its democratic institutions in order to prevent any re-emergence of military rule through conspiracies and coup d’etats. The widspread jubilation among the public at large on the streets after Musharraf’s exit was a transparent testimony to the democratic aspirations of the people that Musharraf, the autocrat had failed to smother. It is at that very moment that cracks appeared (…)

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  Georgia Marks End of US Unipolar Moment

  3 September 2008, by Ash Narain Roy

  William Hazlitt, one of the greatest English prose writers, once wrote: “If your enemies can’t find a flaw in your reasoning, they will quickly find one in your reputation.” The Georgian forces’ assault on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, masterminded by the melodramatic President, Mikheil Saakashvili, took everyone, including Russia and the West, by surprise. On hindsight, it appears the military misadventure was intended to frame Russia as an aggressor through lies and deception (…)

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  Indian Season of Troubles

  3 September 2008, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Our season of troubles seem to have started again. The first was over the trust vote against the UPA Government.There was hardly a need for a trust vote but for the impetuosity of the Central Government or, more precisely, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the matching obduracy of the CPM leadership led by Comrade Prakash Karat.
  The PM seemed in a frantic hurry to strike the nuclear deal while Bush was still the President of the US. Normally countries avoid making a deal with an (…)

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  Singur: How Buddha ’Implemented’ Jyoti’s Pledge

  3 September 2008, by Manas Ghosh

  When Jyoti Basu was sworn in as the Chief Minister of the first Left Front Government in West Bengal on June 21, 1977, one of the many “solemn pledges” that he and his senior Minister, Krishnapada Ghosh, made to the mammoth gathering that had assembled before Writers’ Buildings, which spilled over to the neighbouring streets, was that his credo was that his Ministry would “never betray the interest of the State’s small and marginal farmers and landless agricultural labourers”. He was candid (…)

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  Kashmir : Nearing Zero Hour

  3 September 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Kashmir today has become the touchstone of Indian statesmanship. The crisis that has emerged there can no longer be managed by conventional methods of settling political acrimony. It has gone much beyond, and now it has assumed the magnitude of a definite threat to the integrity of the country. The militants who want Kashmir to secede from the Indian Union are today in control of life and politics—at least in the Valley itself. It is time the public in this country was informed about the (…)

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  Heal and Renew

  3 September 2008, by Badri Raina

  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right. (Hamlet)
  In an act of conspicuous courage (some might say ‘audacity’) the young, bright, and fiercely upright Omar Abdullah has breached the pall of silence in which the Valley has remained suffocated since the coerced exodus of the Pandits in 1990.
  In a statement recorded on his blog, Omar has made the following candid aversions that interrogate Kashmiri Muslims as a whole:
  ”It is so (…)