Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• God on Shoulders: Lumpen Proletariats and the Political Agenda of Kanwar Yatra

  31 August 2019

  by Navneet Sharma and Anamica
  Move your body, Move your bum
  Bhole bam, bhole bam, Bhole bam
  —A popular song emanating from blaring DJs in Kanwar Yatra
  Every year people in and around Delhi and in the so-called ‘cow belt’ wait with baited breath for not only monsoon in Sawan or Shravan but also for the peaceful conduct of the KanwarYatra. This yearly ritual is dreaded because lumpenism and hooliganism run amok on the street and the government not only turns a blind eye to these but (…)

• Bhupesh : Some Reminiscences

  31 August 2019, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  To write about somebody whom one has known for more than four decades—sometimes very closely—is not easy after his or her passing away. For me, Bhupesh Gupta was one whom I have known from the early beginnings of my active political involvement in the late thirties.
  In the small group of young militant Indians in Britain more than forty years ago, groping for a revolutionary path to the country’s freedom, Bhupesh was perhaps the only one who could really claim to (…)

• Rest in Peace, Comrade Kutty. The Struggle Continues

  31 August 2019

  TRIBUTE
  by Beena Sarwar
  The following is what Pakistani journalist Beena Sarwar recently wrote in her syndicated column as a tribute to Pakistani and South Asian public figure B.M. Kutty who breathed his last in Karachi on August 25, 2019. She sent it to Mainstream for publication at the earliest.
  Early Sunday morning (August 25, 2019) in Karachi, a little over a month after his 89th birthday on July 18, 2019, B.M. Kutty slipped into the ever after. Lifelong activist, trade unionist, (…)

• Facing a Storm

  31 August 2019

  A razing storm is blowing. You face it like an oak tree against its cyclonic speed, but get uprooted in the end.
  Or you bend like a willow, letting the storm pass over, again regain your posture, finding foothold on the soil.
  Upheavals come, rattle life. How to face them? Is it like a stubborn oak, a lithe willow or both, balanced, blended?
  A.K. Das

• Dear PM, Please check your facts

  31 August 2019

  by Subhash Gatade
  Jean Dreze, the Belgian born Indian economist and activist, who has co-authored books with Nobel Laureates like Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, reached headlines for entirely different reasons.
  Photo of the placard he was carrying at a protest rally in Delhi challenging the govern-ment’s controversial move to scrap Article 370 really went viral. It displayed stats comparing Jammu and Kashmir and Gujarat, showed how Gujarat lagged behind J&K on a raft of development (…)

• Bukharin: The Great Humanist Revolutionary

  31 August 2019, by Anil Rajimwale

  BOOK REVIEW
  Nikolai Bukharin by Sobhanlal Datta Gupta; Seribaan, Bakhrahat, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal; 2019.
  In the post-Soviet collapse period, there has been a growing search for alternatives to orthodox Marxism and for humanist and democratic forms of socialism. The long repressive Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union led to struggle against the gross distortions, questioning the methods totally contrary to the spirit and theory of scientific socialism. The distorted repressive (…)

• Gone Away! Lost Happiness

  31 August 2019

  by Harish Chandola
  Veteran journalist Harish Chandola recently lost his son. In the following piece he has written about him. It is being published here for the benefit of our readers. Chandola is a prolific writer with a wide knowledge of developments in countries like Afghanistan and those of West Asia and the Arab world.
  Bani (Abani), my son, passed away on Wednesday, August 21, 2019, in a New Delhi hospital of multiple organ failure. The machine monitoring his heart-beat started (…)

• Solidarity of “Social Left” alone can guide the “Party Left” | Gopal Krishna

  31 August 2019

  by Gopal Krishna
  In his “End of ‘Left-politics’ in India?”, Sunil Ray (August 3, 2019, Mainstream) has attempted to develop a critique against the rootless thought of ‘Left-politics’ having lost its relevance to India. It is crystal-clear that “Left-politics” does not begin and end with the fate of Left parties; it rises whenever enough people from “Social Left” engage, mobilise and organise themselves truthfully with concrete social conditions for comprehensive justice, it gets subdued (…)

• Prof Ashok Parthasarathi Is No More

  31 August 2019

  Renowned scientist and former S&T Advisor to late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Prof Ashok Parthasarathi, 79, passed away at his residence in New Delhi on August 12, 2019 after a brief illness. He leaves behind his wife, Vibha, and sons, Vibodh and Unmesh. Mrs Parthasarathi is a reputed educationist and was the Principal of Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi. Vibodh works in the field of Media Policy and Unmesh, based in Singapore, works in the sphere of Media Business Strategy.
  Prof (…)

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  Grim Scenario on I-Day 2019

  19 August 2019, by SC

  Editorial
  Once again we are approaching another Independence Day, our seventythird. But it will be observed under conditions that are qualitatively different from the ones in the past.
  Only recently this month, on August 5, the ruling party of the country by dint of the brute majority it enjoys in Parliament (reinforced as it is by its stupendous victory at the hustings barely three months ago thereby recording its second stint in power) carried out a coup of sorts—revoking Articles 370 (…)