Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Unchallenged Hegemony of BJP

  2 December 2018

  by Vijay Kumar
  Ever since the Gujarat Assembly elections held in December 2017, the Congress party under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi has been on the resurgence. The Congress missed the formation of the government in Gujarat, the home State of the Prime Minister and the President of the ruling party, the BJP, by a narrow margin. Thereafter, the Congress did well despite anti-incumbency, and succeeded in outsmarting the BJP in May 2018 by installing a government in Karnataka led by H.D. (…)

• Quest for the Lost Dignity

  2 December 2018

  by Sardar Amjad Ali
  The Indian National Congress, a party of distinction and heritage, fought the battle of liberation of India from the foreign yoke of 200 long years. With a heritage of Gandhi-Nehru-Indira’s association, the party, since 2014, has been under a most heinous attack, as a party of irrelevance in the Indian contemporary political history, by the mainstream media of the country. Their main contention is that a party, having 130 years of descent, could secure only 44 seats in (…)

• Voice of Dissent: When Art becomes Anti-National

  2 December 2018

  by Ram Puniyani
  Banning of books, opposing cricket teams and singers from Pakistan are not very new in India. We had seen the banning of the Satanic Verses, digging of the cricket pitch in Wankhede Stadium of Mumbai to oppose the Indo-Pak match, disruption of the ghazal programme of Ghulam Ali in Mumbai amongst many others. The intensity of this intolerance has grown by leaps and bounds in recent times. The music programme which has been targeted this time is that of T.M. Krishna, the (…)

• Indian Constitutional Courts and Secularism — I

  2 December 2018

  by Irfan Engineer
  This is a two-part article. This is the first part. The second and concluding part will be carried in the following week’s issue of Mainstream dated December 8, 2018.
  Traditions and customs are being used to redefine and redraw the contours of secularism in India in the last couple of years. The constitutional parents, with near unanimity, if not unanimously, embraced the principle of secularism and that principle was followed in the initial years of the (…)

• On P.N. Haksar’s twentieth death anniversary

  2 December 2018

  November 27 this year marks the twentieth death anniversary of P.N. Haksar, the eminent administrator and distinguished diplomat as well as one of the country’s foremost thinkers. He was the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and a Member, UN International Civil Service Commission. On this occasion we offer our sincere homage to the abiding memory of that towering personality, by reproducing the following written by him and published (…)

• Retelling the Tale of Hashimpura Massacre

  2 December 2018, by Arup Kumar Sen

  The story of Hashimpura massacre in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh (UP), committed more than three decades back, has come back to the public domain after the recent verdict of the Delhi High Court, which sentenced 16 Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel involved in the massacre to life imprisonment. There are different narratives of the massacre. “One theory is that the killings were retribution for the murder of Prabhat Kaushik, a young Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh worker who had died of a (…)

• Remembering October-November 1984

  2 December 2018, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Early next week, on October 31, the country would be observing the tenth death anniversary of Indira Gandhi who had been cruelly shot down on this very day by her own security guards right inside her residence.
  By all accounts it was a ghastly tragedy committ6ed by those who had been embittered by the ‘Operation Bluestar’ at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The perpetrators of Indira’s assassination owned up the full responsibility for their gory deed which in their (…)

• Thirtyfour-year Mockery of Searching for the Perpetrators of 1984 Sikh Massacre

  2 December 2018, by Shamsul Islam

  Inssan abhee tak zinda hae,
  zinda hone per sharminda hae!
  Human beings are still alive,
  they are ashamed to be alive!
  [Shahid Nadeem’s couplet on the silence of civil society against communal violence]
  For the last 30 years, on every anniversary of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs, this author has been reminding the nation how the Indian state and judiciary did not bother to punish the perpetrators of this horrendous mass killing of the innocents of the second largest religious minority (…)

• To Meena Alexander (1951-2018)

  2 December 2018

  Your childhood shuttled between India and Sudan,
  With your metrologist father, mother and sisters—Anna and Elizabeth;
  You chose to live in America,
  Homeless, yet at home in three continents.
  Your way with words
  Walked you towards
  Your own way in the world;
  Draupadi in my kitchen,
  Undraped then redraped
  in Manhattan;
  Who said Alexander the Great
  Conquered the world?
  It was you Meena,
  With your dark eyes flashing with insight,
  Swathed sensuously in a flaming orange (…)

• Uzbekistan Under New Regime — from Isolation to Integration

  2 December 2018

  by R.G. Gidadhubli
  Uzbekistan is the second largest and most populous state among the five Central Asian countries with a population exceeding 34 million. Shavkat Mirziyoev, taking over the presidency of Uzbekistan in 2016 after the demise of Islam Karimov, has undertaken the task of transformation of the country through reforms and changes in domestic and foreign policies discarding the former policy of repression and isolationism, which he could not do earlier as the Prime Minister. (…)