Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• First-generation Learners at JNU are Beacons of Hope for their Communities

  8 December 2019

  by Binoy Viswam
  Campuses all over the world have been breeding grounds of ideas and activism. How can one forget the student activism in Paris that frightened the French ruling class in the 1960s? During the Vietnam war, campuses in the US were centres of the anti-war movement. Students in Latin America have waged heroic struggles against fascist dictatorships.
  One needs to look at recent developments in the JNU from this perspective. The JNU signifies ideas, values and commitments that (…)

• Why Higher Education should be Subsidised

  8 December 2019

  by Khalid Khan
  The ongoing protest against the hike in hostel fee has again triggered a series of questions on the Jawaharlal Nehru University which is closely related to the debate on privatisation of higher education. The larger narrative around which the students are protesting, fall under the framework of the government’s role in higher education. This can be understood from the perspective of public-private debate in education. The continuous withdrawal of the government’s commitment (…)

• It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: The Holy Cow in India and the Global Inability to End Terrorism

  8 December 2019

  by Partha S. Ghosh
  Why choose the title of a 1963 American comedy to headline this month’s column? At first glance, the plot of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has nothing to do with what I am going to discuss. And yet, in one essential sense, it drives home my point. Just like the movie hovered around the madcap pursuit of $ 350,000 in stolen cash by a diverse and colourful group of eleven strangers, the 193 nations of the world today are chasing security and material success without (…)

• Mahatma Gandhi’s Ram-Rahim Approach for Inter-religious Harmony

  8 December 2019

  by Jayanta Kumar Dab
  Mahatma Gandhi, during his public career, advanced inter-religious cooperation. He found that necessary because the core of religious teaching is love and kindness. According to Gandhi, “All religions teach that we should all live together in love and mutual kindness.”1 Inter-religious collaboration can be instilled by promoting the observance of religious injunctions and by celebrating the festivals of different religions and through inter-religious prayer.
  Thus, (…)

• Statues of Clay

  8 December 2019

  by Murzban Jal
  There is a famous saying that when two fight, the third profits. The Brahmans thus divided the shudras and the atishudras and now are enjoying themselves at the cost of the shudras.
  —Jotiba Phule, Slavery
  There is a great need for someone with sufficient courage to tell Indians: ‘Beware of parliamentary democracy; it is not the best product as it appears to be’.
  —B.R. Ambedkar, The Failures of Parliamentary Democracy
  Alienation as the Terrible Future of India (…)

• India is not quite yet a Hindu Rashtra: 70th Constitution Day

  8 December 2019

  by Aurobindo Ghose
  In January 2018, four top Supreme Court Judges in a surprise move, held a press conference declaring that “Democracy is at stake, and we have a debt to the nation”. Justice Ranjan Gogoi, as he then was, had also remarked that “independent judges and noisy journalists are democracy’s first line of defence”. Three of these judges have retired as judges, over a year ago. The fourth became the Chief Justice of India (CJI) on October 3, 2018. On the evening of November 25, (…)

• A Lesson for Consul General Sandeep Chakravorty: Diplomacy is About Not Saying the Wrong Thing

  8 December 2019, by Nyla Ali Khan

  It is detrimental to democracy when the Consul General of India in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty, asserts that in order to facilitate the return of the displaced Pandit community, India will build settlements in Kashmir.
  This sort of deleterious rhetoric, when employed by diplomats and policy-makers, becomes the authoritative discourse of officialdom.
  In the current prevailing “culture of fear”, such rhetoric gives further impetus to forces of bigotry and intolerance. The fear of the (…)

• Hard-Earned Rights of Construction Workers are Badly Threatened

  8 December 2019, by Bharat Dogra

  COMMUNICATION
  After a long struggle of almost two decades two important laws for the welfare and social security of construction workers were enacted in 1996. These provided for a cess of one per cent to be imposed on construction works which can fund pensions, health and maternity benefits for construction workers and scholarships for their children. Thirtysix building and other construc-tion worker boards (BOCW boards) have been set up in different States and Union Territories since then (…)

• A Letter to B.R. Ambedkar

  8 December 2019

  by Inamul Haq
  The following letter has been written in a competition organised by the Department of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat on Constitution Day (November 26, 2019). It was awarded the first prize.
  Jai Bhim!
  I do not know how to start this letter. As you are the father of the Indian Constitution, I have so many questions regarding my basic rights that are not being fulfilled. Babasaheb, you took a lot of difficulties in framing the Constitution, borrowing (…)

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  Weakening the Bonds

  5 November 2019, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Today is October 31, 2019. It is being observed as the