Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• OROP — Lies, False Claim, Suicide

  17 November 2016, by S G Vombatkere

  Veteran Subedar Ram Kishan Grewal, aged 70 years, unhappy at the government not providing OROP to Veterans, committed suicide by consuming poison in Delhi on November 2, 2016.
  OROP had been the focus of intense agitation over many months at Jantar Mantar in 2015, and the government prevaricated and dodged the core issue, with PM Narendra Modi, RM Manohar Parrikar and FM Arun Jaitley making different, often conflicting, always confusing, statements on OROP. It all began with the BJP’s prime (…)

• Sangh, Simon and the Question of Rationality

  17 November 2016

  by Shrikant Wad
  The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, had a historic win in the general elections of 2014 in India. It has com-pleted two years successfully. This essay is an attempt to analyse the ideological influence of the BJP on the present-day Indian society, more specifically on an individual Hindu-Indian voter, using the disciplinary knowledge base of Public Administration. In the liberalised, modern economy of India, it is pertinent to understand such an (…)

• Validity of Nehru

  17 November 2016, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  November 14 this year marks Jawaharlal Nehru’s 127th birth anniversary. On this occasion we are reproducing the following editorial by N.C. published in the Mainstream issue that came out on the third death anniversary of our first PM. Thereafter we are carrying excerpts from Nehru’s speeches, writings and interviews that are highly relevant in the current Indian scenario. Some articles on Nehru published at different times in this journal and a couple of pieces (…)

• Nehru for Today

  17 November 2016

  I have no love for bigotry and dogmatism in religion, and I am glad that they are weakening. Nor do I love communalism in any shape or form. I find it difficult to appreciate why political or economic rights should depend on the membership of a religious group or community. I can fully understand the right to freedom in religion and the right to one’s culture, and in India specially, which has always acknowledged and granted these rights, it should be no difficult matter to ensure their (…)

• Some Memories of Nehru

  17 November 2016, by Mohan Kumaramangalam

  It was in 1936 that I first met Panditji. I was in my second year at Cambridge and he had come to Europe in connection with the serious illness of his wife, Smt Kamala Nehru.
  At that time he also came across to England and down to Cambridge and met us, the Indian students there.
  Our family had known Pandit Nehru for a long time because when Panditji was at Cambridge, my father and mother were studying at Oxford but unfortunately since I was educated in England from 1927 I personally did (…)

• Remembering Nehru Today

  17 November 2016, by M. C. Chagla

  Gandhiji was the one man who played the most important role in building a secular India. Both Gandhiji and Nehru were secularists, but their approach to secularism was different. While Gandhiji was essentially a religious man, Nehru was not religious. But he wanted people of different religions to live in this country in peace and harmony. He was essentially a modernist with a tremendously broad outlook, and therefore he often felt that the rituals and the dogmas and the prejudices and the (…)

• Secularism: A Heritage to Defend

  16 November 2016, by D.R. Goyal

  You do not have to be an idol-worshipper to remember Nehru today. Every day something happens that compels your mind to recall a man exerting every nerve to pull his countrymen out of the morass of superstition, to debunk the ‘bullock-cart mentality’ and to instil in them the confidence that they could shape their own destiny. He was a man far above his peers, loved and adored by the millions, respected and honoured the world over as the passionate voice of peace and freedom; a man who could (…)

• Nehru’s India, a Nation Still Wandering between Two Worlds

  16 November 2016

  by Sukumaran C.V.
  “The alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance, and it yields the most abnormal kind of illegitimate brood...the combination of politics and of religion in the narrowest sense of the word, resulting in communal politics is—there can be no doubt—a most dangerous combination and must be put an end to. This combination is harmful to the country as a whole.”
  — Jawaharlal Nehru
  Independent India has miserably failed to put (…)

• Nehru’s Views about Democracy

  16 November 2016

  by Vivek Kumar Srivastava
  Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is not only the first Prime Minister of India but also the main gardener who sowed and flowered the spirit of democracy in a highly diverse country. His ideas of democracy were liberal but classical. He was a man of inclusive nature who lived a life absolutely devoted to India and for him this devotion rested on the edifice of democratic ideals. He conceptualised democracy in the Western liberal framework where the elections were to be (…)

• GM Crops — Difficult Questions for the Modi Government

  16 November 2016, by Bharat Dogra

  The protest organised by the satyagraha against GM Mustard at Jantar Mantar on October 25 was much more than an ordinary dharna. On the one hand representatives of the Opposition parties like the Congress, CPI-M, CPI and AAP lashed out at the support extended by the Modi Government to GM crops whose serious hazards are well-established. On the other hand there were also representatives of organisations like the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) which are a part of the Sangh Parivar and yet have (…)