Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Indomitable Indira—Strategist Par Excellence

  14 November 2007, by C. Sheela Reddy

  This article, written on the occasion of Indira Gandhi’s twentythird death anniversary (which was observed on October 31, 2007), could not be used last week; hence it is being published now. —Editor
  Prime Ministers come and go, but some just don’t leave the office. Their policies influence future decisions, their statecraft stirs debate and their legacy wins or loses elections. They shape history. Indira Gandhi’s reign for 16 years as the Prime Minister marked a watershed in India’s (…)

• A Velvet Divorce in China

  14 November 2007, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Beijing thoughtfully chose a sub-provincial city on the banks of the Songhua River in the far northeast corner of China as the setting for the third “stand alone” trilateral meeting with Russia and India at the Foreign Ministers’ level, which China last month hosted for the first time.
  Harbin, nicknamed “Moscow of the Orient”, is a city with which Russia and its culture has been long and intimately associated. A foreigner travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late 1980s would (…)

• Tempered Steel

  14 November 2007, by Sumit Chakravartty

  November 7 this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the historic October Revolution that heralded the birth of the USSR and transformed the world. On this occasion we reproduce the following report by the Mainstream editor written while he was working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1977 (on the basis of an interview with a legendary participant in the October Revolution on the eve of the Revolution’s sixtieth anniversary). Although written in conditions vastly different from the (…)

• Red Star Glows Brighter...

  14 November 2007, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The Red Star over the Kremlin spires will shine brighter this week when on November 7 the world celebrates the grand jubilee of the greatest revolution in history.
  The pilgrimge to Moscow today is indeed the triumphant proclamation of man’s unending quest for building a better and a nobler world, in which the blood and toil of the many can never be turned into the greed and gold of a few, where the meek and the humble shall inherit the earth. Those who will gather in the the Red Square on (…)

• Birth Of A New World

  14 November 2007

  This brief record of the first few days of the Great October Revolution shows the titanic effort and the energy Lenin displayed in guiding it. The popular uprising that swept the country was led by the Bolshevik Party.
  Evening, November 6
  At 9.00 pm from the apartment in Vyborgskaya Storona in Petrograd in which he was in hiding, Lenin sent a letter to the members of the Party Central Committee, calling for an immediate attack.
  “Comrades,
  “I am writing these lines on the evening (…)

• Festival of Freedom

  14 November 2007, by Nagarjun

  On the bitter cold November night when the sailors of the battleship Aurora fired at the Czar’s Winter Palace at Petrograd they knew that they were participating in a historic revolution, but were perhaps unaware of the fact that they were pushing the world from the dark catacombs of pre-history to the open arena of history. What the Russian Revolution achieved this week fifty years ago was indeed to help to bring about what Marx had foretold, that with the abolition of class exploitation of (…)

• Why the Indo-US 123 Agreement should be Firmly Opposed

  14 November 2007, by Bharat Dogra

  One important reason for the many confusions and contradictions in the recent debate on the India-US 123 Agreement is that these merely reflect some glaring contradictions in the wider debate on nuclear energy and atomic weapons.
  • The existing arsenals of nuclear weapons on earth have the capacity to destroy most forms of life on our planet many times over. Clearly the complete elimination of these weapons from earth should get the highest priority. But at present non-proliferation (…)

• EDITORIAL

  3 November 2007, by SC

  With Congress President-cum-UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s visit to China and the Left leaders’ painstaking efforts to assuage the ‘hurt’ feelings of PM Manmohan Singh getting frontpage prominence in our national dailies ‘Janadesh 2007’ has predictably received less than adequate attention in our media thereby once again mirroring the skewed priorities of the contemporary media scene in this era of consumerist culture in a ‘globalised’ world. Even some of the otherwise progressive newspapers (…)

• On Tehelka’s Gujarat Sting

  3 November 2007, by Mukul Dube

  Shortly after the telecast of the Tehelka sting operating on Gujarat 2002, a friend telephoned to remind me of a discussion some of us had had in the middle of 2004. We had agreed that despite the dismal situation at the time, with the new government in Delhi making no effort to do anything about the Gujarat massacre, sooner or later the truth would come out. What we counted on was the certainty that at least some of the many functionaries of the Sangh Parivar, who must have been involved, (…)

• No-Work, No-Pay for the Legislators : A Welcome Move

  3 November 2007, by Rajindar Sachar

  Press reports that the Lok Sabha Speaker wants to apply the principle of “no-work, no-pay” to those legislators who disrupt proceedings in the House has been universally welcomed. The legis-lators, with cheek in their tongue, term it as an abridgement of their parliamentary privileges, but the masses find this self-glorification laughable. The conduct of such legislators is a standing shame to the nation and calls for immediate action. A recent study by a civil society organisation found (…)