Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Congress must set its House in Order

  9 October 2016

  Can the Congress Party be retrieved? This was the question posed to me. Another one is: whether or not the party is relevant. Answering the last question first, I said that a 150-year-old organisation, which has loyal members even in the remotest rural areas, cannot be irrelevant. The Congress led the independence movement and has ruled the country for more than five decades. For my generation, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, who were the top two leaders of the Congress, are icons and I (…)

• Gwadar and Chabahar: Rushing to the oil-and-trade precipice

  9 October 2016, by S G Vombatkere

  Prime Minister Modi’s bringing up “Balochistan” during his August 15 address was criticised, especially since he omitted to mention the ongoing, acute crisis in Kashmir. While the validity of the criticism of omission may hold good, mentioning Balochistan could be a calculated move to reverse India’s traditional passivity against Pakistan’s aggressive India policy. India’s turning a spotlight on Balochistan has the possible disadvantage of Pakistan telling the international community that it (…)

• Re-reading Bengal Renaissance

  9 October 2016, by Arup Kumar Sen

  This year is the birth centenary year of Benoy Ghosh, who is a pioneer in writing and documenting the social and cultural history of Bengal. He got attracted to Marxism in his student days. After his graduation in 1937, he started working as a journalist, and worked in some of the leading Bengali dailies and periodicals of the time. After moving away from the CPI in 1948, as many other intellectuals did, he did his Masters in Ancient Indian History and Culture, and established himself as a (…)

• On Brics Summit

  9 October 2016, by Eduardo Faleiro

  The Eighth Summit meeting of BRICS will be held in Goa on October 15 and 16. The heads of state and government of the five member-countries will participate in the meeting. India has also invited the heads of state and government of BIMSTEC for an outreach meeting during the Summit. BIMSTEC is a regional group that brings together Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand as well as Nepal and Bhutan with the objective of technological and economic cooperation among South Asian and (…)

• Philogagging, Hermeneutics and International Politics

  9 October 2016

  by Ashfaq Maqsood Ali
  Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century philosopher and an idealist, while arguing that only pure reason can lead to truth, excluded almost everything derivable from sensation and experience. For him, things do not present themselves to the mind, through senses, as they really are. Thus, relying on sensory experience alone people only know things as they seem to be — never as they actually are. Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein in their book, Plato and a Platypus, (…)

• Why Unrest Never Dies In Kashmir?

  9 October 2016

  by Fayezah Iqbal
  In the once serene and bewitchingly beautiful Kashmir Valley, unrest and wild turbulence has spelt unimaginable horror in the lives of the people. A colossal deal of irreversible damage and destruction to the lives, property and people’s faith in democracy and government has been unleashed ever since the imposition of AFSPA in 1990, implemented to combat insurgency in the region primarily.
  For that matter AFSPA has only added fuel to fire in all the regions where it had (…)

• Farmers made Homeless and Landless by River Erosion still Waiting for Relief and Rehabilitation

  9 October 2016

  COMMUNICATION
  Imagine a farmer family leading a secure life based on its fertile fields suddenly becoming not just landless but also homeless in the span of a few hours. This has been the tragic and traumatic experience of thousands of rural families not only this year but also in most recent years. Whether it is the Malda and Murshidabad areas of Bengal or Gazipur and Bahraich districts of Uttar Pradesh or other remote areas of Bihar and Assam, the problem of river erosion has been (…)

• ‘Surgical Strikes’ and After

  3 October 2016

  POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
  The ‘surgical strikes’ by the Indian Army in the wee hours of today at seven places in the PoK where infiltrators had assembled to cross the LoC and infil-trate into India for carrying out terror attacks, was executed with commendable planning and preparation. Pakistan’s initial reaction was to downplay the impact of the strike as Islamabad was taken completely aback by the Indian action which it apparently did not anticipate. Expectedly, there is euphoria in India for (…)

• Voice of Sanity in the Midst of Insanity PIPFPD’s Joint Statement

  3 October 2016

  In the wake of the heightening of tensions between India and Pakistan, the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy issued on September 23 the following Joint Statement with the objective of restoring peace, normalcy and cooperation between the two neighbouring states of South Asia.
  The PIPFPD expresses its concern over the growing tensions between India and Pakistan following the militants’ attack on a strategically important Army base in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir. The (…)

• Using NGOs to Pressure New Delhi, US Style

  3 October 2016

  by Hasan Hamidullah
  The US is known to widely use NGOs to make foreign governments succumb to its pressure in promoting American interests at the cost of those countries’ national interests. This policy is practised in India as well.
  During a conference in Bengaluru the noted NGO, Amnesty International, charged the Indian authorities with violating human rights in Jammu and Kashmir. That accusation came at a time when the Government of India was doing its best to prevent the conflict in (…)