Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• From Satan to Rushdie: Why Book Bans Always Fail | Santosh Mathew

  4 October 2025

  When the Supreme Court of India recently dismissed a petition to ban Salman Rushdie

• Remembering Asghar Ali Engineer | Arup Kumar Sen

  4 October 2025, by Arup Kumar Sen

  26th Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Uma Chakravarti, the eminent feminist historian, on October 3, 2025. The occasion reminds us of the sincerity and commitment with which Asghar documented and analysed the communal riots and violence in postcolonial India. In fact, he played a pioneering role in documenting the dark side of Indian history unfolding before our eyes. The book edited by him in the early 1980s, Communal Riots in Post-Independence India (Sangam Books, (…)

• A River of Grief: What Zubeen Garg

  4 October 2025

  On the morning of September 21, as Zubeen Garg

• As Long as Privilege Exists, Reservation Must Exist | Sunit Singh

  4 October 2025

  Rethinking the Rationale for Caste-based Reservation
  Reservation is one of the longest and most emotional debates in India. In a sociology classroom I attended, we were discussing caste in India. Students came from diverse regions, social backgrounds, and castes. Almost everyone agreed on one thing: caste has been a form of oppression. Even those who said caste is disappearing admitted that at some point in history, caste was an oppressive system. Everyone accepted that lower castes were (…)

• Street Vendors

  4 October 2025

  Social exclusion, defined as the systematic barring of individuals and groups from one or more dimensions of society as structures of power, privilege, opportunities, and resources, has been a persistent feature of human civilisations. Across the world, societies have developed mechanisms-some overt, others subtle-to deny large sections of the population access to material and symbolic goods, thereby institutionalising inequality. In Europe, exclusion discourse has often centred on labour (…)

• Reviving Farm Biodiversity and Protecting Rights of Farmers | Bharat Dogra

  4 October 2025, by Bharat Dogra

  One of the biggest worries relating to the food and farming system at world level has been that in recent decades the diversity of crops being grown on the fields of farmers has declined to an alarming extent. The diversity of crops has decreased and in addition the diversity of varieties of crops has decreased even more and their genetic base has become narrower.
  Earlier the crop diversity had evolved over a period of over ten thousand years on farms and for much longer in nature. Apart (…)

• Trump

  4 October 2025

  The US government has introduced H-1B visa reforms, including a $100000 fee for new applications, a wage-based lottery system, and priority for STEM (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics) graduates and small businesses, aiming to prioritise highly skilled workers and protect American jobs. This policy openly reflects elements of economic nationalism in the US, prioritising domestic labour market protection over global talent attraction. The world is stunned by the drastic increase (…)

• Jane Goodall, the gentle disrupter whose research on chimpanzees redefined what it meant to be human | Mireya Mayor

  4 October 2025

  October 1, 2025
  Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall [1].
  Goodall

• Trump

  4 October 2025, by Faraz Ahmad

  Within 48 hours of US President Donald Trump, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the butcher of Gaza, in tow, announcing on September 29, in Washington, final cessation of Israeli war on Gaza, or rather the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has broken the compact and its Defence Minister Katz ordered all remaining Palestinians In Gaza city, their last refuge, to leave Gaza City immediately underlining that it was their

• New American Gaza Peace Plan To Promote American Hegemony | Soma S Marla

  4 October 2025, by Soma S. Marla

  On September 29, 2025, President Trump unveiled a 20-point peace plan to end the two-year-long Gaza genocide by Israel. The proposal comes amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, that caused enormous human suffering of human life that has never been heard of since World War II. The plan is offered at a time when global outcry condemning Israeli genocide and major Western nations recognised the Palestinian state and demanded an immediate ceasefire. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has (…)