Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

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  Indira Gandhi at Crossroads

  11 July 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The four furies that have beset the Prime Minister—Food, Fertiliser, Foreign Aid and Foundation—have brought into the open an unexpected alignment of forces that perhaps nobody in New Delhi could have predicted on the morrow of Smt Indira Gandhi’s election as the head of the Government.
  The general impression in the Capital at that time was that Smt Gandhi would draw upon her good relations with the Left-wing elements in her party and outside, even if she hesitated to lean on them for (…)

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  Kerala’s Flourishing Spiritual Bazar

  11 July 2008, by N A Karim

  Kerala is deservedly famous for its educational advancement, social progress and cultural regeneration among the States of India. Long before Independence an impressive line of social reformers like Sree Narayana Guru revolutionised the traditional regressive beliefs of the people and made them progressive in their outlook in all social, political and cultural matters. It was in this upturned social soil the seed of socialism was sown which soon sprouted and changed the political landscape (…)

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  On Unrest in Darjeeling

  11 July 2008, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  Communication
  This has reference to the editorial captioned “Unrest in Darjeeling Hills” (Mainstream, June 14, 2008). While one could easily agree with the general tenor of the editorial that the CPI-M did not allow the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council experiment to succeed because of their sectarian interests, one could not, however, agree with the view that “the proposal to grant Sixth Schedule status to Darjeeling should have been allowed to materialise”.
  Nepalis settled in Darjeeling (…)

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  Nepal Constituent Assembly Election 2008: An Observer’s Account

  11 July 2008, by Uddhab P Pyakurel

  Many Nepalese and foreigners who have been carefully watching and following the political developments of Nepal have been surprised by the results of the Constituent Assembly (CA) election which was held on April 10, 2008. There were many pre-poll surveys, guesses etc. regarding the possible election results. There were arguments that voters would again favour the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) to be the first and second largest (…)

• Sonia Gandhi has to take the Political Call

  30 June 2008, by SC

  In the wake of the failure of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal to break the deadlock over taking the India-specific safeguards agreement worked out with the IAEA to the atomic watchdog’s Board of Governors for approval, it is necessary to dispassio-nately analyse the subject. If one undertakes such an exercise, it would become transparent that the PM’s plea that the nuclear deal would ensure energy security for the country is vastly exaggerated. In fact the contention of Manmohan (…)

• Rural Loan Waiver or Moral Hazard?

  30 June 2008, by Girish Mishra

  For almost a decade or so, the news of suicides by debt-ridden farmers has been constantly hogging the headlines of Indian newspapers. These suicides have been taking place largely in relatively more advanced States like Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka etc. The relatively backward States like Orissa, Bihar, UP, Jharkhand, Assam, Chhattisgarh etc. have been largely immune from this epidemic. This may be because the relatively advanced States have been more closely linked up (…)

• Day One in Calcutta

  30 June 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Ten years ago, in the afternoon of June 27, 1998, Nikhil Chakravartty breathed his last. Remembering him after 10 years, we are reproducing some of his finest reports, editorials and articles that appeared in this journal and elsewhere over the last sixty years. We are also reproducing the speech that our former President, K.R. Narayanan, delivered while unveiling N.C.’s portrait at the Press Council of India (New Delhi, February 28, 1999), and publishing several reminiscences by those who (…)

• The Story of a Gadfly

  30 June 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The following is one of the best exposés of N.C. as a reporter and it was carried in the India Press Agency feature news service N.C. had founded with another outstanding Communist journalist, David Cohen (who thereafter left the Communist Party on the issue of Jewish persecution in the Soviet Union) in 1957. This report resulted in M.O. Mathai’s resignation from the post of the PM’s Special Assistant following a furore in Parliament in 1959.
  New Delhi, January 3—A question is very often (…)

• Musings on Tamil Nadu

  30 June 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The ouster of the Karunanidhi Ministry and the imposition of President’s Rule in Tamil Nadu can hardly be regarded as anything more than the streamlined extension of the Emergency dispensation over a State whose government by devious means tried to avoid falling in line with it.
  On this score, the Governor’s report has a ring of authenticity’s though it can be legitimately asked why K.K. Shah had to take—or persuaded to take—seven long months to come to this conclusion. For the lay (…)

• Do We Need Nehru Today?

  30 June 2008, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Twelve years ago Jawaharlal Nehru died in harness on May 27. Inevitably, much has changed in these twelve years among his people and in the humanity at large. He was not the man who would have preferred the status quo to change; and if the landscape and the skyline of this country have changed—at places beyond recognition—Nehru, had he been alive, would have tried to understand them, accelerate the process of change.
  What we who belong to the generations after him have to ponder over is (…)