Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Pasmanda Movement and the Question of Secularism

  30 July 2008, by Khalid Anis Ansari

  As I write these words the news of the Left withdrawing support from the UPA Government has just started to pour in. Presumably, it has not come as a surprise to anyone. It had been in the offing for quite some time now. But obviously the political temperatures are bound to go up with various political pundits and players rushing to announce their own recipes for the coming parliamentary elections. With the economy on a downward spiral—symbolically made worse in the public imagination by the (…)

• India-Specific Safeguards Agreement

  30 July 2008, by Gretchen Smith, Rekha Chakravarthi

  Since the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, the bilateral agreement has attracted serious scrutiny from various sources. The most recent source of contention surfaced on July 9, 2008, when the India-specific Safeguards Agreement was made public. This document—the first of three steps India must take to operationalise the 123 Agreement—drew a deafening response from nuclear analysts in India and the United States. Although statements were issued by the Indian and American governments, the (…)

• Novel Presentation of Freedom Struggle and Partition

  30 July 2008, by Mahi Pal Singh

  Book Review
  Company Raj Se Gantratra Tak by Prof Mushirul Hasan (Hindi translation of the author’s ‘From John Company to the Republic’—translated by Mrs Madhuri Pal); Aakar Books, New Delhi; pp. 275; Rs 395.
  There has been a great need and demand of various scholarly books on all subjects in the regional languages in India. In fact, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties has filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court for directions to the NCERT and the University of Delhi to make (…)

• Learning from Clinton Climb-down

  30 July 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Sometimes the man-in-the-street’s reactions to world events turn out to be more pertinent than the profundities of foreign-policy pundits. Not that the foreign policy of a country could be decided by the public excitement of the day. There are occasions when a wise statesman may not hesitate to go against the tide in the conviction that the public would ultimately acknowledge the wisdom of a decision which may not have evoked instant applause.
  The importance of public opinion in the (…)

• Confidence Motion and Communists

  30 July 2008, by Chaturanan Mishra

  I don’t mind Communists voting with the BJP because I think in the parliamentary system such a situation is unavoidable particularly as the BJP has acquired the position of one of the biggest all-India parties. But this time it was our own creation. We demanded a confidence motion in the Lok Sabha. Communists did not realise that their withdrawal of support to the Manmohan Singh Government will please the corporate sector and they will do their best to see that the Manmohan Government wins (…)

• Open Letter to the Prime Minister to Scrap the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

  30 July 2008

  Dear Prime Minister,
  We, the undersigned, demand scrapping of the Indo-US nulcear deal with immediate effect. The content of the deal, which is currently being negotiated between India and the US, was first laid out in the Joint Statement issued by the Prime Minister and the US President on July 18, 2005 from Washington D.C. and further reiterated on March 2, 2006 in another Joint Statement issued by them from New Delhi. The signing of the Henry Hyde Act on December 18, 2006 is a (…)

• An Open Letter to the UPA Government from an Independent

  30 July 2008, by Nina Dey Gupta

  The ‘Trust Vote’ has been cast and won by 19 votes on July 22 but at what price?? The distrust of the government by the people does not decrease in the awareness of the immoral ladder used to acquire the ‘magical’ number for survival. Post-Left withdrawal of support, the ‘life-savers’ who kept you from drowning and will keep you afloat (hopefully!) till the next General Election a few months from now, come from an amorphous group and it certainly did not behove a great party as the (…)

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  Ominous Portents

  22 July 2008, by SC

  The murky goings-on in the Capital prior to the trust vote next week is not only most unfortunate, its consequence could weaken our democratic structure. The signs of desperation in the Congress circles are palpable; hence concealing facts all kinds of myths are being propaganted by the party leadership from the supremo to the heir-apprent to the spokespersons; and now the PM, in an exclusive interview, has reiterated that the Indo-US nuclear deal is “beneficial to India’s growth, that it (…)

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  Nuclear Deal, Left Parties and Priorities for People

  22 July 2008, by K Saradamoni

  The media in general has made the question of the Indian Government’s ‘nuclear deal ‘ with the United States of America into an affair between the Congress and the Left parties; or to be precise a few leaders in select Left parties. Both the print and the electronic media report what they understand as happening between the two sides. This does not mean that there are no people who understand the intricacies of the deal. Even in the limited number of dailies and journals I see, several (…)

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  Partition and Friendship

  22 July 2008, by Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan

  The following piece appeared as a letter in the Pakistani daily Dawn from where it is being reproduced with due acknowledgement.
  For many years I had been searching for Suvira Mann to condole her husband K. C. Mann’s death, I just could not find her.
  K. C. Mann, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India, and Suvira were very good friends of Mazhar’s, my husband, and mine when they lived in Lahore. We worked together and she was a great help. She happened to (…)