Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• A Nation that Segregates and Kills the Less Privileged

  9 March 2020

  by Sukumaran C.V.
  In the first week of September 2017, I was in Gandhinagar with my JNU friend who is an Assistant Professor at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. He picked me up from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, Ahmedabad and while travelling through the city, I noticed a plastic mat was draped as a wall for a long stretch preventing our view beyond it and I asked my friend what was beyond the mat wall. He replied that it is a slum and it was (…)

• Kashmir: Home and Longing

  9 March 2020

  by Swati Sehgal
  The row around promotions and screenings of the recently released film, Shikara: The Untold Story of Kashmiri Pandits, speaks volumes about the social role of this creative medium. It is a strange dichotomy how a film functions as a medium both to bring to the fore and obliterate issues from the public domain. This latest work by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, released on February 7th, 2020 treads this treacherous path with the claim of narrating the story of a genocide that has not (…)

• Go to Pakistan and Demonising Indian Muslims

  9 March 2020

  by Ram Puniyani
  ‘Go to Pakistan’ is probably the most-used phrase to target India’s Muslims today. Recently, Akhilesh Narayan Singh, a Superintendent of Police at Meerut district in Uttar Pradesh shouted (a video of the incident is in circulation) “go to Pakistan” at protesters at Lisari Gate, a prominent ‘Muslim’ locality of the city. “Those wearing black or yellow armbands—tell them to go to Pakistan,” he says in the video.
  Singh’s seniors in the force have stood by him. They are it a (…)

• The BJP Has Wilfully Let Delhi Burn

  1 March 2020

  in lieu of EDITORIAL
  The following is the editorial that appeared in The Wire (February 26, 2020). We are using it here in lieu of an editorial with due acknowledgement.
  For three days, northeast Delhi has been in the grip of armed vigilantes mobilised by Hindutva politicians to attack and terrorise those protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Given the nature of the mobs and their leaders, the violence quickly lost any pretence of a ‘political’ motive and descended into crude, (…)

• We the People of India and Visit of Trump

  1 March 2020

  by D. Raja
  The use, rather abuse, of massive amount of people’s money by the Modi Government to welcome President Donald Trump in a mammoth gathering in a stadium in Gujarat spoke volumes of exhibitionism and utter servility of powers that be in India to please the President of the USA. The slum dwellers of Ahmedabad were hidden behind a long wall specially erected on the road on which Trump’s carcade moved. It is indeed painful that the Modi regime, instead of wiping out poverty, is (…)

• That was the Decade that was!

  1 March 2020

  by L.K. Sharma
  February 2020 turned out to be the most ominous month for India. The national Capital burnt with communal violence as the police watched! The organised lawlessness killed and injured people, while the democratic rulers held a grand feast for the visiting American President, Donald Trump. The weird situation made a journalist recall the era in which Nero fiddled.
  Trump adopted Narendra Modi as his soul-brother. He once called him the Father of the Nation, taking away (…)

• Silent Departure of Girmitiya

  1 March 2020

  TRIBUTE
  by Prem Singh
  An important Hindi writer, Giriraj Kishore, who lived quietly in the world of literature, left the world silently on February 9 (2020) at the age of 83. His condolence meeting, which was held on February 14 in Delhi, also passed silently. Barring a couple of Hindi critics, no major Hindi writer attended the solemn occasion to pay tribute to him. However, many senior Gandhi-family colleagues were present in the condolence meeting.
  Giriraj Kishore was a person of (…)

• “...Mukt Bharat”

  1 March 2020

  by Sardar Amjad Ali
  In the present political scenario of the country, the battle the Congress under the leadership of its young President, Rahul Gandhi, with the guidance and inspiration of Smt. Sonia Gandhi, is fighting, is certainly a very difficult one. It is a battle, in my estimation, not only against a divisive force in the guise of a political party called the Bharatiya Janata Party but also with its co-horts as well, having a common agenda of “Congress-Mukt Bharat”.
  Looking at (…)

• In Lieu of Five Acres: Being a Muslim in India

  1 March 2020

  by Navneet Sharma and Anamica
  Gar galtiyaan Babar ki thi, toh Jumman ka ghar fir kyu jale?! —Adam Gondvi
  Jumman is the quintessential character portraying the typical imagery of an Indian Muslim; the one who is afraid of what he is by religion, of what he eats, what he wears, how he prays and where he prays. In India, the social identity of a Muslim is crafted as the ‘other’ to cater to the ‘us-them’ politics; and in daily discourse it is hammered into the people that Muslims are ‘they’ (…)

• AAP Has Successfully Forged a Model for Regional Forces to Emulate

  1 March 2020, by Badri Raina

  Months after the Bharatiya Janata Party rode to electoral victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, a fledgeling new activist outfit, christened the Aam Aadmi Party, won the Delhi State Assembly elections with an aplomb that was rare in modern Indian electoral history—67 of 70 seats.
  Who would have thought that in the aftermath of the second Modi triumph at the Centre five years later, the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections would offer such a déjà vu moment? And how: After all the blood and gore (…)