Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Twentyfive Years of PRIs: A Few Disquiets

  10 June 2018

  by Suranjita Ray
  The local governance through the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in rural India came into force on April 24, 1993 with the adoption of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment which was introduced in 1992. The Municipal Corporations in urban India came into force on June 1, 1993 with the adoption of the 74th Constitutional Amendment. The following article analyses how the PRIs have functioned in these 25 years.
  Democracy in India, perhaps, would not have been the same today (…)

• Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Constitutional Morality and Karnataka Elections

  10 June 2018

  by S.N. Sahu
  The Karnataka Assembly election results of 2018 have been seen from many perspectives of power politics and their critical importance have been underlined for shaping the possible electoral arithmetic of the general elections of 2019. It is extremely significant that the Karnataka elections and the post-poll alliance forged by the Congress and JD(S) should be seen from the perspectives of constitutional morality and employment of the constitutional method which Dr B.R. (…)

• Contours of China Crisis

  10 June 2018, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Twentynine years ago, N.C. had left for China when the Tiananmen bloodbath took place on June 4, 1989. Apart from his despatches which appeared in The Times of India on the tragedy that befell that great country at that time, he also wrote this detailed piece which was published in Mainstream (June 17, 1989). This was an enlarged version of an article in The Times of India (June 12, 1989).
  The contours of the emerging set-up in China are still very blurred as the (…)

• Remembering Tiananmen

  10 June 2018

  No miracle will ever clean
  The memory, bestial and obscene,
  Of those who, having fouled their trust,
  Grew warped with dread and powerlust—
  And ordered fire on the square,
  On unarmed people everywhere,
  Brave people seeking to be free
  Of rottenness, of tyranny. Vikram Seth
  [This poem was written twentynine years ago and published in The Times of India on June 6, 1989. It is being reproduced—courtesy The Times of India—in memory of the Tiananmen martyrs.]

• They Flee From Me Who Sometime Did Me Seek

  10 June 2018, by Badri Raina

  (With Acknowledgement to Thomas Wyatt)
  They flee from me who sometime did me seek, Finding fault where none was before; Every proclaimed success now seems to them A canny cover-up for failure.
  Once a man of substance to droves Across a so aspiring spectrum, My thunderings now annoy Like the groans of a hollow drum.
  Too late now for me to emulate Examples of sincere, subdued men Who speak little but deliver Without gruesome discrimination.
  I may of course still cause a blast That (…)

• Drifting Apart: Transatlantic Alliance in Disarray

  10 June 2018

  by Purusottam Bhattacharya
  Ever since he came to power sixteen months ago, President Donald Trump has been an enigma—both to his admirers and detractors. In the opinion of many analysts his performance—both on the domestic and foreign policy fronts—has been chaotic, if not anarchic. Things have been made more difficult to discern due to the torrent of tweets that flow from him with contradictory twists and turns day in and day out. Figuring out a consistent agenda out of this maze of what (…)

• Ireland Marches towards Liberalism:Referendum on Abortion of May 25, 2018

  10 June 2018

  by Gautam Sen
  The Irish people have convincingly voted in a historic referendum on May 25 this year, by a 67 per cent to 33 per cent majority, in favour of restoring the right of women to abortion. Only one Irish county, Donegal, close to the border with Northern Ireland, voted ‘No’. Abortion has been illegal in the country under Sections 58 and 59 of the ‘Offences against Persons Act of 1861’. In Ireland, the right to abortion has been an emotive issue over the past five decades. However, (…)

• To a Dalit

  10 June 2018

  Sporting an upturned moustache, wearing jeans, shades, riding a horse to the wedding— and you face a roadblock of hatred. They say these are privileges you’re not supposed to enjoy.
  You react: ‘the Holy Book’ teaches all are equal, every one having a right to live with dignity and honour! Why, then, is this discrimination, segregation from the main stream professed to be egalitarian?
  They outreach, soothe your feelings, flaunting an ameliorating list of what has been done for your (…)

• Bangladesh Bhavan in Visva-Bharati

  10 June 2018

  by Samit Kar
  The recent Convocation in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan was held on May 25 in the presence of Narendra Modi and Sheikh Hasina Wajed. The latter was present on the occasion of the inauguration of the Bangladesh Bhavan within the Visva-Bharati campus to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the glorious annals of 47 years of Indo-Bangladesh relationship. Bangla-desh, under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, had always been the (…)

• On FDI by Highly Industrialised Countries in Developing States: Some “Unconventional Thoughts”

  10 June 2018, by Ashok Parthasarathi

  By the 1950s when the developing countries started what the great Swedish economist, Professor Gunnar Myrdal, called the “Great Ascent from Grinding Poverty to a Prosperous Life”, Western economists in general—with the notable exceptions like Myrdal, Nobel Laureate US economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and another US Noble Prize-winning economist Josef Stiglitz (the person who went from being the Chief Economist of the World Bank for 10 long years to trenchent repudiator of the entire (…)