Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Sangh Reprisal Against Dalit in Modi Raj

  15 August 2016

  by Arun Srivastava
  The July 11 incident of brutally thrashing Dalits in Una in Gujarat has been different from the earlier atrocities perpetrated against them. This was for the first time the cow vigilantes forced a Muslim boy to thrash the Dalits. Undoubtedly it was aimed at sending the message that even Muslims do not support and sympathise with the Dalits and are anti-beef. Generally the Muslims are supposed to share the economic miseries of the Dalits and the political parties usually (…)

• Politics of Coalition Formation in the Backdrop of Indian Democracy and Governance

  15 August 2016

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Bharti Chhibber
  Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India by Sanjay Ruparelia; New Delhi: Oxford University Press; 2015; pp. 480; Rs 995.
  Several political parties cooperate in a coalition government in Cabinet formation minimising the dominance of any one party in a parliamentary form of governance. The coalition process is generally adopted in cases of hung Parliament when no single political party has achieved majority in Parliament. Likewise a political (…)

• India’s Quest for Military Power: The LCA Milestone and Beyond

  15 August 2016

  by Bhartendu Kumar Singh
  Great powers have great strengths! Yet, with almost 70 per cent import of its total weapons’ requirement, India is the world’s largest arms importer since the last few years. This absolute dependency mocks India’s profile as a rising great power, in particular, its military aspect. India remains a laggard and an inconsequential player in the international arms market, being placed at 26 in the list of arms exporting countries. Therefore, the recent induction of two (…)

• Cow Vigilantism as Terror

  15 August 2016

  The following is a write-up prepared by the New Socialist Initiative on Cow Vigilantism. It has been sent by Subhash Gatade who is actively involved in the NSI.
  Cow vigilantism, which has received tremen-dous boost since the ascendance of the BJP at the Centre, got its first fitting reply in Gujarat recently. The way in which a self-proclaimed Gau Rakshak Dal—owing allegiance to the Shiv Sena—attacked in Una (July 11, 2016) a group of Dalits who were skinning a dead cow, publicly flogged (…)

• Mahasweta Devi : Quintessential Humanist

  15 August 2016

  TRIBUTE
  by Vijay Kumar
  Writing is a career of death in a sense; it signifies the absence of the author, and great writing is certainly a gateway to immortality. This is the single greatest and lasting solace for a writer. Mahasweta Devi is no more, but her writing will endure and her place is firmly secure in history.
  What makes Mahasweta Devi different from other writers is that she combined her writing with activism anchored firmly in the most sublime dimension of humanism. In this (…)

• Arundhati Ghosh

  15 August 2016

  TRIBUTE
  by Sukharanjan Sen Gupta
  Arundhati Ghosh of the Indian Foreign Service (1963 batch), who recently passed away in New Delhi, came into prominence in 1971, during the Bangladesh liberation war. On March 25, 1971, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan rose in revolt against the colonial domination and exploitation by the Punjabis of West Pakistan and declared independence. Indepen-dent Bangladesh came into being. The Pakistani rulers unleashed a reign of terror on the unarmed (…)

• Politics of Polarisation is Recoiling on BJP

  10 August 2016

  POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
  The politics of communal and caste polarisation, relentlessly pursued by the BJP from the time it came to power on its own in 2014, is now recoiling on itself. First, the party’s UP Vice-President Dayashankar Singh had to be expelled for his obscene comment in public that Mayawati, the Dalit leader and BSP supremo, was ‘worse than a prostitute’. Even if the so-called expulsion was meant for public consumption in a poll-bound State, it failed to cut any ice with the Dalit (…)

• The three stages of truth

  10 August 2016, by S G Vombatkere

  On my grandfather’s sixtieth birthday on July 16th, 1945, the atomic bomb was tested in the USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twentyone days later, on August 6th, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when the USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima. The experiment was immediately hailed in The New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US President Truman said: (…)

• Kashmir, Zakir Naik, Attack on Minorities

  10 August 2016, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Though curfew has been lifted in most parts of the Kashmir Valley after 17 days of turmoil which has left 47 persons dead and over 2000 grievously injured, there is no trace of peace. In fact, fresh reports of nine more cases of pellet injuries. Pellet guns in use even after much hue and cry! Extremely confusing signals—what, with several politicians quipping ‘no pellet guns’ but the CRPF’s top brass coming up with an additional one-liner: pellet guns only in extreme situations. (…)

• Is Zakir Naik Really Dangerous?

  10 August 2016

  Around the autumn of 2009 when Khushwant Singh was working on his book Absolute Khushwant’ and I was putting together/compiling his views-cum-viewpoints, he looked towards me and quipped—
  ‘What do you think of Zakir Naik?’
  ‘Zakir Naik! Who Zakir Naik?’
  ‘That Mumbai doctor who gives talks on Islam.’
  ‘Haven’t heard him. Is he good?’
  ‘No, no, unimpressive... he comes across as no great scholar. In fact, the mundane techni-calities he speaks of overshadow the real and actual essence of (…)