Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Kathua Rape: A Tale of Savagery of the ‘Civilised’

  28 April 2018, by Arup Kumar Sen

  What happened in the Rasana village of Kathua district in Jammu is an unimaginable tale of savagery. An eight-year old girl belonging to the Bakkarwal community, a nomadic Muslim community, was first gang-raped and then brutally killed.
  The Bakkarwal community, who survive on grazing sheep, goats and horses, migrate with their flock to Kashmir and Ladakh in the summer and to Jammu in the winter, camping at forest sites they have used for centuries. Recent evictions have reportedly made the (…)

• The Age of Darkness Is Upon Us

  28 April 2018, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Why should life get so degenerate so often in our country? See the multiplying rape cases, each more brutal than the other. Why should party leaders talk like party leaders and not like human beings when human issues come up? Comments on the Kathua rape horror were an indiscretion, said the BJP’s buddhijeevi, Ram Madhav. Why should election advertisements assume that the citizen is an ass? One that asks Karnataka voters to support the BJP “for a corruption-free State” carried (…)

• Changing Contour of Dalit Politics and New Idioms

  28 April 2018

  by Arun Srivastava
  The RSS might have the magical wand to solve the problems of Hindutva and evolve the mechanism for ushering India into the Hindu Rashtra, but it utterly lacks the vision for uniting the Dalits and take them out of the nightmare of the isolationist politics being practised by it and its political mouth organ BJP.
  From luring and poaching the so-called Dalit leaders from other political parties to worshipping local Dalit deities, the Sangh resorted to all kinds of (…)

• Ode to B.R. Ambedkar

  28 April 2018

  A question creeping from within:
  Babasaheb, what you’ve come to be?
  Still a messiah for the downtrodden
  or just a symbol appropriated
  only for narrow electoral gains?
  Your statue being built, demolished,
  re-erected, painted, re-painted
  in opposing colours, now guarded
  within an iron enclosure, sends out
  a message scripted in different ink.
  This may be the outer manifestation.
  But deep churning lies inside
  the voice you gave to the oppressed.
  It rises above, (…)

• Farmers’ Income

  28 April 2018

  by Samit Kar
  Recently, Narendra Modi reiterated his government’s commitment to double the income of the Indian farmers at a national conference held in New Delhi. He stressed on the imperative to implement a four-pronged strategy regarding: 1. Reducing cultivation costs, 2. Ensuring profitable prices, 3. Processing of farm waste, and 4. Creating non-farm source of income.
  Earlier, the Prime Minister formed a high-powered Committee on April 13, 2016 under the Chairmanship of Ashok Dalwai, (…)

• India-Bangladesh: What if the BNP returns?

  28 April 2018

  by Aparupa Bhattacherjee and Sourina Bej
  Bangladesh is gearing up for its general election in December, this year. With its two main political parties—the BNP and AL (Awami League) led by Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina respectively hedging against each other—the election will be decisive in determining the future of bi-party politics in the country along with shaping the roadmap for Bangladesh in the region. After holding power for two consecutive terms an anti-incumbency wave could (…)

• Kathua Rape, RSS-Hindutva Operations, Salaams to Sachar Sahib

  28 April 2018, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  How can the BJP-RSS indulge in the unthinkable—that is, defend the rapist beasts involved in the Kathua rape! In fact, the spokespersons of the BJP even tried distracting the viewers’ attention on the small screen by talking non-stop of the several other rapes reported from the other sectors of the country. A rape is a rape. The tragedy compounds when communal politics holds sway. We are turning vultures; pulling out children from their home terrain, raping and killing them, (…)

• The Controversy

  28 April 2018, by Badri Raina

  The honourable Chairman of the Rajya Sabha has ab initio rejected the motion for removal of the Chief Justice of India, signed by sixtyfour Members of Parliament.
  One Member, namely, the reputed Senior Advocate, Kapil Sibal, has contended that in acting as a quasi-judicial persona, the honou-rable Chairman has engaged in an “illegal” determination on the petition. Mr Sibal’s argument is that the grounds for rejection do not stand the test of the provisions of Article 124, insofar as the (…)

• Former Civil Servants’ Open Letter to PM

  28 April 2018

  The following is the text of an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by forty nine former civil servents.
  We are a group of retired civil servants who came together last year to express our concern at the decline in the secular, democratic, and liberal values enshrined in our Constitution. We did so to join other voices of protest against the frightening climate of hate, fear and viciousness that the ruling establishment had insidiously induced. We spoke then as we do now: as (…)

• 

  Narendra Modi in London

  22 April 2018, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  PM Narendra Modi is now in London to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). At a public function there yesterday—an event of the Indian diaspora in the UK called Bharat ki Baat, Sabke Saath—he did unequivocally condemn the Kathua rape case wherein an eight-year-old girl was kidnapped by several culprits, taken to a secluded place, repeatedly raped for days and then brutally murdered. Incidentally, Modi was among the first BJP functionaries to do so, most of (…)