Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Singur and CPM’s Development Paradigm

  24 April 2007

  While Union Coal Minister Shibu Soren’s conviction and sentence on grave charges of abduction and murder has caused acute embarrassment to the UPA dispensation at the Centre and the Opposition BJP has predictably seized the opportunity to corner the ruling coalition with renewed vigour, one of the principal supporters of the Central Government—the CPM—has been placed in an unenviable position for the overzealous advocacy of a Tata car factory at Singur in West Bengal’s Hooghly district by (…)

• SINGUR! Do We Really Want Rabindranath?

  24 April 2007, by Mahasweta Devi

  Kolkata’s Bengali daily, Dainik Statesman, on the happenings in the State. In the following piece she exposes the role of the powers that be in attempting to destroy Tagore’s Santiniketan—once again in the name of ‘development’, the word the State CM has been continually employing to defend the indefensible actions of his government in Singur. We are reproducing it with due acknowledgement. (…)

• On Development and Loss of Livelihood

  24 April 2007

  We are deeply anguished at the large scale displacement and loss of livelihood being caused through widespread land acquisition all over India by the State Governments with the active encouragement of the Centre in the name of promoting ‘development’.
  In this context we are highly concerned over the grave situation that has developed on the issue of the setting up of a Tata car factory on large tracts of first class agricultural land at Singur in Hooghly district of West Bengal. We are (…)

• Launching into a Self-destructive Path: West Bengal Government’s Blinkers and Perverse Logic

  24 April 2007, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  Marxists did—and to some extent in certain respects, could, reasonably—boast of advanced thinking, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today’s “Marxists” have become so myopic as to be devoid of the perspective of equitable and sustainable development even in commonplace terms. The context of “global warming” is beyond their ken even though its shadow is lengthening all over the world, West Bengal not excluded.
  On the question of equity, the Communists have been in the (…)

• Special Economic Zones - Neo-Zamindari zones?

  24 April 2007

  Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are not a new concept, but the scale and speed and the socio-economic ambience in which these are being created are entirely new. Economic Processing Zones (EPZ) existed in India and SEZs are reportedly a tremendous success in China , starting 1979. But in present-day India, there are growing sections of the population across the country that are protesting, the position is rapidly hardening, and the “E” in SEZ is being seen to stand for “exploitation” or (…)

• Violence in Singur

  24 April 2007, by Kunal Chattopadhyay

  Hardselling Capitalist Globalisation in the name of Left Alternative
  Several thousand police and paramilitary forces are now roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghly district, West Bengal. On December 2, they fired tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a few outside supporters who had gone to the area. Television channels, so far strongly supportive of the moves of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government, now found themselves projecting a story totally at variance with the (…)

• In Search of a Radical Legacy of B. R. Ambedkar

  24 April 2007

  The contribution of B. R. Ambedkar to modern Indian social and political thought is immense. But, his legacy carries multiple meanings. In his discourse on Ambedkar in the 1990, Upendra Baxi lamented that even the Subaltern Studies acknowledged Ambedkar after publishing its six volumes. He identified multiple Ambedkars in the context of his centenary celebration:
  …there is not one but there are many Ambedkars or there are many kaleidoscopic images. When we presume to celebrate the (…)

• Madhubani Revisited

  24 April 2007, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  As the Chairman of the Bihar Land Reforms Commission, I had the opportunity to revisit Madhubani on November 14-15, 2006. The time gap between the first and the second visit was over three decades. A piece on the first trip to Madhubani was published in Mainstream sometime in 1973. The present one is a ‘Post Script’.
  Infrastructure-wise Madhubani remains as backward as before. The road distance between Patna and Madhubani is 160 km. The road conditions are so bad that it takes over seven (…)

• Human Rights: No End to Denial of Right to Life

  24 April 2007

  We observe December 10 as the Human Rights Day every year. Critiques then made highlight violation of human rights across the world. But the focus generally remains on civil and political rights. The foremost human right, the right to life, suffers from inadequate attention. We may recall that Thomas Jefferson, who was largely responsible for the drafting of the US Declaration of Independence, declared that among the inalienable rights are those of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. (…)

• Agrarian Relations in Two Bihar Districts: A Field Study

  24 April 2007, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  The following paper—published in Mainstream (June 2, 1973)—was prepared for the Land Reforms Division, Planning Commission, and the Working Group on Land Reforms, National Commission on Agriculture, New Delhi on the basis of a field trip to Madhubani and Muzaffarpur in Bihar in April 1973 by a Visiting Group consisting of Dr Z.A. Ahmed MP (CPI), Krishan Kant MP (Congress), Era Sezhiyan MP (DMK), A.K.K. Nambiar (Revenue Secretary, Kerala Government), S.K. Mitra (Joint Director, National (…)