Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Private Universities: Where Do India’s Intellectuals Stand? | Prem Singh

  7 January 2023, by Prem Singh

  1
  Ravela Somaiya, a senior socialist friend living in Hyderabad, had sent a video to me about two months back. I opened the video and found Ramchandra Guha’s speech in it, which was delivered at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. I closed the video without listening to that speech. This university came into limelight last year for abruptly terminating the services of Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He had been the Vice Chancellor of this university for two years between 2017 and 2019. He (…)

• Militarisation Of Bhagat Singh’s Revolutionary Heritage | Shamsul Islam

  7 January 2023, by Shamsul Islam

  The following quote is from the first paragraph of Lenin’s great work; The State and Revolution:The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917) underlining a cardinal truth; how rulers and their henchmen/women repress those ideologies and individuals who strive to emancipate masses from the exploitative rules. This chameleon like lot uses every trick in their criminal armoury.
  “What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, (…)

• Significance of the Launch of Digital Currency by India’s Central Bank | Anil Kumar Kanungo and Ujjvala Kanungo

  7 January 2023

  by Anil Kumar Kanungo and Ujjvala Kanungo *
  Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) decisive move to initially discount the growing promises and popularity of crypto currency in India is quite praiseworthy. In a highly uncertain, volatile and non-transparent global financial regime, adoption of cryptos as a currency runs the risk of putting Indian economy into jeopardy. What instead worth considering was a controlled, transparent and reliable digital currency such as CBDC (Central Bank Digital (…)

• India’s fumbled chance for sharing knowledge | Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan

  7 January 2023

  by Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan *
  India was an early leader in sharing research and information for science. But it has fumbled since then.
  In terms of open access to knowledge, India could have been the Vishwa Guru — the world’s teacher. As early as 2000 India was making moves to allow taxpayer-funded research to be freely available for anyone in the world to read, share and distribute. But India has squandered that advantage.
  Fast forward to 2022, and much of India’s research (…)

• The Tree’s Gift | Sagari Chhabra

  7 January 2023, by Sagari Chhabra

  One day the tree tired of staying rooted on the brown soil, decided to foil, the onlookers, who rushed by in the traffic of haste, leaving footprints of waste; never paying any heed to her inner beauty.
  She saw her fragrant pink pistils discarded for pistols, her stamen stamped by men in boots, who climbed up constructing a security hatch, sensing a plot to kill a dignitary; all this damaged her dignity.
  She stood alone, quite forlorn; stopped her offerings of flowers, shoots and (…)

• Mysterious missing pages of Babarnama | Sankar Ray

  7 January 2023, by Sankar Ray

  The Baburnama, English (Memoirs of Babur), memoir of a poet-prince from Central Asia and the founder of Mogul empire in India , Zahiru’d-din Muhamad Babur (1483–1530), translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge from the original Turki and published in 1922. It was originally written in Chaghatai Turkish which is different from Turki. Mrs Beveridge’s version, mysteriously spiked pages of the diary between 3 April and 17 September 1528 . Mrs Beveridge was the wife a British ICS officer Henry (…)

• Why LTTE Can Never Be Revived | M R Narayan Swamy

  7 January 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

  More than 13 years after it met an inglorious end, one thing can be said with certainty about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE): the once-feared insurgent group can never come alive again.
  Occasional arrests of people allegedly linked to the LTTE trigger speculation that attempts may be on to revive an outfit which once controlled a third of all land and two-thirds of the winding coastline in Sri Lanka.
  Nothing can be farther from the truth.
  Whatever opinion one may hold (…)

• India’s got the BRICS blues | M K Bhadrakumar

  7 January 2023, by M K Bhadrakumar

  January 6, 2023
  The Brazilian news agency reported that Lula da Silva’s inauguration as the new president on January 1 for a historic third term amidst a carnival-like backdrop was attended by over five dozen foreign delegations, composed of heads of government, vice presidents, foreign ministers, special envoys and representatives of international organisations. It was the largest event with high-level international figures in Brazil since the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
  The BRICS leaders (…)

• Philosophy of the City and Planning Ideology, excerpt from ’The Right to the City’ | Henri Lefebvre (1968)

  7 January 2023

  [Below is an excerpt from the The Right to the City (1996) by Henri Lefebvre translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. The original book by Henri Lefebvre titled ’Le Droit à la ville appeared in 1968]
  In order to formulate the problematic of the city (to articulate problems by linking them), the following must be clearly distinguished:
  I. The philosophers and philosophies of the city who define it speculatively as whole by defining the ‘homo urbanicus’ as man in (…)

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  Detention and brutal torture of labour rights activist, Shiv Kumar in Haryana | PUDR statement

  7 January 2023

  PEOPLE’S UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
  Condemn Torture, Demand Action
  29 Dec 2022
  People’s Union for Democratic Rights welcomes the findings of the report submitted by the District and Sessions Judge, Faridabad into the illegal detention and brutal torture of labour rights activist, Shiv Kumar in January 2021 by the Haryana Police.
  Part of the findings ordered by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in the petition filed by Shiv Kumar’s father in February 2021, the report substantiates (…)