Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Internet In China : The Media’s Changing Face

  2 July 2007, by Gunjan Singh

  The first connection of the Chinese mainland with the Internet was established in September 20, 1987. Since then the Internet has grown to host the largest base of net users in the world. In the past few years the Internet boom in China can be seen in the light of a new cultural phenomenon.
  In the year 1996, China banned access to almost 100 websites in order to prevent the delivery of offending information. The banned sites included sexually explicit sites, Western news outlets, (…)

• Amend Bhim Smriti to Annihilate Caste

  2 July 2007

  On June 9 and 10, 2007, the Rajasthan Brahman Sabha held a meeting at Salasar, and resolved to launch a peaceful agitation to demand job reservation. (The Times of India, Lucknow, June 12, 2007, p. 7) This comes in the immediate aftermath of the violent agitation of the Gujjars, who had demanded a change in their status from OBC (Other Backward Caste) to Scheduled Tribe (ST). The Meenas of Rajasthan, who had been enjoying an ST status hitherto, opposed the Gujjar stir fearing competition in (…)

• Secularism, Nationalism and Democracy in the Context of the 2001 Parliament Attack

  2 July 2007, by K S Subramanian

  BOOK REVIEW
  Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror by Nandita Haksar; Promilla & Co. Publishers in association with Bibliophile South Asia, New Delhi; pp. 348; Rs 450.
  The author of this remarkable volume is a distinguished lawyer and legal activist. Given her family background, one would have expected her to become a leading light of the establishment, educating the rest of her countrymen on how to serve the nation and be good, patriotic Indians! On the (…)

• The Speaking Flower

  2 July 2007, by Sagari Chhabra

  A flower grew on tropical soil its petals waxen white, its centre crimson; the people knelt and smelt her intoxicating fragrance and then felt mysteriously—free.
  Soon the flower was transplanted onto yonder shores, it blossomed, sprouted limbs, swaying in the wind, it breathed the breeze of liberty.
  One day, the flower returned; striking her original soil her colours ignited; from her petals crimson rose enflamed: ‘even the searing heat cannot erase the blood on the street.’
  White (…)

• The Story of a Gadfly

  2 July 2007, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  This was 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.
  (All about the PM’s P.A. and the Trust for his Mother) (…)

• After Thirty Years

  25 June 2007, by SC

  Thirty years ago, on this day, that is, June 21, the Left Front Government came to power in West Bengal led by the organisationally well-knit cadre-based CPI-M and headed by one of the most outstanding personalities in State and national politics, Jyoti Basu.
  Following the LF’s resounding victory at the hustings, it was written in these columns by the founder of this journal while recalling the emergence of the first Communist Government in Kerala in 1957:
  After twenty long years, a (…)

• Ramsey Clark’s Statement to the Convention

  25 June 2007

  The following is the statement to the Convention from Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney-General, whose outspoken indictment of the lawless US bombing of Iraq during Gulf War I in 1991, embodied in his report to the than UN Secretary-General, has now become a legend.
  I wish I was able to join with all of you on June 19th in New Delhi, India, at your important meeting to address the needs and grievances of the farmers and rural poor whose lives have been made miserable by the greed of (…)

• For Whom the Bell Tolls

  25 June 2007, by C Raghavan

  Remembering Emergency June 26, 1975
  “Never trust your sons, nor treat them during your lifetime in an intimate manner; because, if the Emperor Shah Jehan had not treated Dara Shikoh in this manner, his affairs would not have come to such a sorry pass. Ever keep in view the saying, ‘The Word of a King is Barren’.”
  Aurangzeb’s alleged will, given in Ankam i-Alamgiri (ascribed to Hamid-ud-Din Khan Bahadur, quoted in Sircar’s Short History of Aurangzeb, p. 390) The din and noise of the (…)

• Musings on the Nineteen Months

  25 June 2007, by Harji Malik

  Remembering Emergency June 26, 1975
  The nineteen-month nightmare is over. Emergency India with its strangulated press, its overcrowded jails, its emasculated courts, its stifling climate of fear, of suspicion, of helpless drifting towards even greater restrictions on human rights largely because of lack of resistance, may soon seem to be just a bad dream for most of us. That is human nature.
  Before this happens, should we not look back in truth at what happened in June twentytwo months (…)

• Drop Charges, Release Dr Binayak Sen Forthwith

  25 June 2007

  We, the undersigned, are dismayed at the continued detention of Dr Binayak Sen, General Secretary of the Chhattisgarh People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), since May 14. Dr Binayak Sen is also the National Vice-President of the PUCL, one of the oldest civil liberties organisations in India.
  Dr Sen epitomises a dwindling tradition in India of public health professionals taking health care to the poorest sections and most underdeveloped regions of this country. For the past 30 years, (…)