Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Page from History: Nehru and Dange | Nitin Deshpande

  4 July 2020

  by Nitin Deshpande
  This is just a note on a piece of history that no one seems to remember in the ongoing debate on the issue of the Chinese problem facing India today. Surprisingly even the media seems lost in endless debate on whether the government was ready or not and so on.
  In the year 1962 when China attacked India, there was an intense debate the world over about the line the Chinese Communist Party had taken especially in the Socialist countries when the then USSR had declared (…)

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  An open letter to International NGOs who are looking to ‘localise’ their operations

  4 July 2020

  An open letter to International NGOs who are looking to ‘localise’ their operations
  Our plea is that you work with us, not against us. We need to be supported, not competed with.

• Women’s safety, protection and freedom is at stake in Poland | Caroline Hickson

  4 July 2020

  We are witnessing the degradation of the rule of law, democracy and common sense in Poland by ultra-conservative and authoritarian actors only concerned with keeping their grip on power.

• Putin set to get his new constitution. But Russians ask, ’Why now?’ | Fred Weir

  4 July 2020

  Vladimir Putin had a plan to reform the Russian Constitution. Then the pandemic happened. Now he’s changed the plan and is rushing it through a referendum, to many Russians’ confusion. What’s going on?

• Digital Divide to Social Divide: A Journey through Pandemic | Debatra K. Dey

  4 July 2020

  As per October 2019, BBC reports India is the home of the second-largest internet user base with 630 million internet users. It thus has been surrounded by the sobering reality of India’s continuing digital divide.

• Is there a Kerala Model of Handling Covid-19? | Joseph Tharamangalam, Jos Chathukulam

  4 July 2020, by Jos Chathukulam, Joseph Tharamangalam

  In the past 3 months we have been daily flooded with news about the unprecedented Covid 19 pandemic by newspapers and the media. Kerala’s people have been proud to see Kerala praised for its successful handling of the pandemic, not just in India, but in several international newspapers and media such as the New York Times and the BBC, just to mention two of the prominent ones.

• Journalism in India Has Placed Itself On Deputation to the Government | Anand K. Sahay

  4 July 2020

  by Anand K. Sahay
  Editors have become ‘faceless technicians’
  By and large, journalism in India has been a mirror image of its rickety- and tawdry- democracy in the Modi years, and has probably hit its lowest point after the commencement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term in office in May, 2019, with a bigger mandate than previously.
  With notable exceptions, in nearly every choice the media made when the State confronted its own citizens, it has been on the side of the (…)

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  Alvida Kalpana Mehta: A Note from WSS on the Passing Away of a Feminist Activist

  4 July 2020

  Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) deeply mourns the passing away of Kalpana Mehta in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The loss of a fellow traveller and a comrade at a time when we are going through a massive public health crisis and continuous clampdown on the right to dissent through arrests and detention makes is hard to bear. Kalpana has been with WSS ever since its inception in 2009.

• Letter from former Prime Minister P.V Narasimha Rao to the Editor, Mainstream on November 3, 2003

  4 July 2020

  The following is the letter written by former Prime Minister P.V Narasimha Rao to the Editor, Mainstream on November 3, 2003 when a meeting was held in New Delhi to release the book, “India-Pakistan: Themes Beyond Borders-Selections from Nikhil Chakravartty’s Writings”; Narasimha Rao was to release the book, but he could not do so due to indisposition; hence this letter.

• Development & Family Planning: A Feminist Perspective | Ramneet Kaur

  4 July 2020

  Often development and population (the numbers) are seen in an inverse relationship. Whenever it comes to development of a nation, population size becomes one of the biggest concerns. It is this concern which lead to emphasis on the practice of regulating population growth. In this process, family planning programmes, involving birth controls becomes an essential medium of attaining desired development. And women body often becomes the subject of focus, as childbirth and pregnancy take place from this body.