Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Remembering Two South Asian Stalwarts

  3 November 2007, by Javed Jabbar

  With the passing away of Nikhil Chakravartty and Mahbub ul Haq less than three weeks apart, on 27 June and 16 July, South Asia has lost two outstanding individuals who belonged to different countries yet shared a deep commitment to the region.
  While the fact that Nikhil Chakravartty was Indian and Mahbub ul Haq was Pakistani underlines their distinct national identities within South Asia, their personal attributes were so universal and humanistic that they rose above the variances to (…)

• Nikhil

  3 November 2007, by Mohit Sen

  It was the mid-forties that I first came across Nikhil. Bundle, my eldest brother, belonged to the outer fringe of the Indian Communist students group formed in England in the late 1930s. Indrajit Gupta, Mohan Kumaramangalam, Parvati Krishnan, N.K. Krishnan, Bhupesh Gupta, Renu Chakravartty, Jyoti Basu, Arun Bose, Rajani Patel, Nikhil Chakravartty were among the members of this group. They all worked with and in the Communist Party of India on their return to our country. At first it was an (…)

• Morphing India’s Afghanistan Policy

  3 November 2007, by Swapna Kona

  Why does India need a renewed policy towards Afghanistan? October 2007 marks six years since Afghanistan has been occupied by outside forces. Hitherto, there’s been a rising cynicism with the Indian policy, or the lack of it, towards Afghanistan. India’s interests in Afghanistan are clear—containment of conflict in its extended neighbourhood and a stake in the energy resources and trade opportunities in the region. But, the relationship with Afghanistan has the undertone of a chronic (…)

• Durga Puja As Protest

  3 November 2007, by Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri

  The four days of Durga Puja signify carnival time in West Bengal. On the main Saptami Puja day—Thursday, October 18—a few of us witnessed a tiny act of defiance by the small traders of Nonachandanpukur Bazaar, in Barrackpore, within the area loosely called Greater Calcutta.
  I say Nonachandanpukur Bazaar, but the 58 year old bazaar was bulldozed to the ground on December 29, 2006, by the now familiar combination of policemen and party cadre. The site is fenced with corrugated tin, and (…)

• China’s 17th Communist Party Congress : An Assessment

  3 November 2007, by Joshy M. Paul

  The 17th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held in mid October (15-21), elected members to the two highest echelons of the Party, the 25-member Polit-Bureau and the Polit-Bureau Standing Committee comprising nine topmost leaders of China. It has given the mandate of Presidentship to Hu Jintao for another five-year term. The Party Congress also made amendments to the constitution to incorporate the incumbent President Hu’s theory of ‘scientific development’ that would (…)

• P.C. Joshi, the Organiser, Communicator and Culturalist

  3 November 2007, by Rakesh Gupta

  BOOK REVIEW
  P.C. Joshi: A Biography by Gargi Chakravartty; National Book Trust of India, New Delhi; 2007; Price: Rs 30.
  Gargi Chakravartty has done a historic service to the cause that Joshiji held to his heart, namely, awaken the masses for social transformation within the national specifics and international generalities, and that too with a human face. In order to do this he organised with a human heart even when he was subjected to the most vitriolic attacks in the organisation that (…)

• Subrata Banerjee is No More

  3 November 2007

  On October 24, 2007 Subrata Banerjee passed away at his daughter’s residence in Washington at the age of 88.
  He was born on November 21, 1919 in Dhaka in East Bengal. Both his parents came from cultured bhadralok families. In spite of many financial and other difficulties his father Sunit Kumar managed to earn his Ph.D. from Birmingham University in 1932 and taught English Literature in several colleges in Bengal and outside Bengal. His mother Nalinibala, who was only 13 when she was (…)

• Triumph and Tragedy in Karachi

  31 October 2007, by SC

  While developments within the country, including the curious fate of the Indo-US nuclear deal (which thankfully will be analysed in detail in Parliament’s winter session unlike what happened in the last session when such a debate was thwarted due to the thoughtless stonewalling by the principal Opposition party), continue to hog the headlines the Karachi attack on Benazir Bhutto’s motorcade on her triumphal return to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile remains at the centre of (…)

• Capital Punishment : A Penological Barbarity

  31 October 2007, by V R Krishna Iyer

  Compassion for all living creatures (Article 51A) and human rights in its spectral dimensions, including the right to reform oneself out of a diabolic past, if any (Article 21), are great constitutional values spelt out in Sunil Batra (AIR 1978 SC) and Maru Ram (1981 SCC) and a number of other refined rulings of the Supreme Court. We have accepted in our Buddha-Gandhi country the reformatory theory of criminal jurisprudence and impliedly departed from the retributive theory which once (…)

• No Illegality in Bandh

  31 October 2007, by Rajindar Sachar

  Ever since Kerala Kerala High Court Judgement (1997) forbidding the call to Bandh and upholding of it by a laconic Order by the Supreme Court (1998) (three judges) there has been amongst trade unionists and political activists a wave of disappointing indignation at such a view which forbids the fundamental right of citizens of speech and association.
  Frustration was added to it because the court held Bandh illegal even when it conceded that there was no material to suggest that the (…)