Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• A Thought on Krishna Menon

  16 May 2016

  by K. Vikram Rao
  Indian’s most unforgettable Defence Minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, was not remembered in his homeland on his 120th birth anniversary on May 3. But his old friends met at the Nehru Centre in London and talked about his views on public libraries. Menon had said in 1932 that there should be as many libraries and commu-nity reading rooms as there were pubs. Reporting Krishna Menon, I found, required special skills. He spoke 150 words a minute on an average and we correspondents (…)

• Modi Government is acting like a Bull in China Shop

  16 May 2016, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The following piece was written sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. So some points made here are dated. Yet given the importance of the issues raised in the overall context we are publishing it for the benefit of our readers.
  Ten years back, the in-house journal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had carried an article —penned by none other than the incumbent Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar who was heading the America Division at that time—passionately (…)

• Acts of Commission and Omission

  16 May 2016, by Kuldip Nayar

  All defence deals have inbuilt commission which is paid to those who purchase arma-ments. The Congress party, after getting power soon after independence, used the money to fight the elections. Babu Jagjivan Ram, the then Defence Minister, managed the funds, not letting the deals becoming a scandal.
  The uproar today is over the kickbacks over and above the usual commission. Now even the defence specifications are changed if the money paid is substantial. This happened in the case of VVIP (…)

• Fat Men and the Starving Millions

  16 May 2016, by S G Vombatkere

  The Nation Wants to Know
  That there are many issues which agitate the minds of the people is beyond dispute. But the minds of elected representatives in State and Central governments appear to be agitated on election issues or matters related to them, rather than the major issues which affect the daily lives of the majority of Indians. If newspaper headlines are an indication of what interests readers and those who make the news which is in headlines, it would appear that the Agusta (…)

• Bangladesh: The Radical Religious Rationale

  16 May 2016

  by Ziauddin Chowdhury
  The dastardly killing of secular elements of different occupations (but mainly bloggers) by extremist fanatics in Bangladesh has roused public opinion in that country. We are reproducing, with due acknowledgement, the following article from Dhaka Tribume by a noted analyst for the benefit of our readers.
  In 2007, Maulana Fazlullah, leader of a Frontier-based militant Islamic organisation known as Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (who later became the leader of (…)

• Debates on the Direction of Democracy in Bangladesh

  16 May 2016

  by Anindita Ghoshal
  Bangladesh was the third country in a row to come out of a nation-making process from a colonial state to an independent one (1947-71). Nationalism played a major role in the fight against colonialism and in shaping up the political boundaries of these states, India- Pakistan-Bangladesh. Yet, the nature of conflicts as well as issues of negotiations and necessities behind the creation of separate states in this geographical area of unified India had changed time and (…)

• Implications of the IIT Fee Hike

  16 May 2016

  by Monish Kumar Babbar and Sandeep Pandey
  The Indian Institutes of Technology Council, headed by the Minister of Human Resources Development, Smriti Irani, based on a recommendation by its Standing Committee, has decided to increase the undergraduate fees from Rs 90,000 to Rs 2 lakhs per year. This now makes IIT education costlier than some of the private engineering colleges. Although this is being done in the name of achieving greater financial autonomy, if this is not privatisation of (…)

• Chhattisgarh: A Land of “Primitive Accumulation”

  16 May 2016

  COMMUNICATION
  Marx used the category “primitive accumulation” to characterize the violence associated with the birth of capitalism.The “robbery of the common lands”, “expropriation of the agricul-tural population from the land” and the “usurpation of...clan property, and its trans-formation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism” were “just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumu-lation”. It should be mentioned in this connection that Marx argued in (…)

• Tagore as a Protagonist of Sustainable Development and Gender Equality

  16 May 2016

  by S.N. Sahu
  Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was a many-splendoured personality whose hundred and fiftieth birth anniversary was celebrated across the country a few years back. (And only a week ago we observed his one hundred and fiftyfifth birth anniversary.) He was one of the noblest gifts of Bengal to humanity and the world. To my mind, Gurudev Tagore was one of the earliest champions of sustainable development and gender equality. All such ideas which assumed centrality to his life and (…)

• The Dilemma of Freedom of Expression and Transgression

  16 May 2016

  by Fayezah Iqbal
  Today we are surfeit with the entertainment of sundry kinds from the digital world and social media in addition to the regular means of television and movies. The dimensions of entertainment have widened and expanded like never before. Especially for the youth there is no particular mode or programme when it comes to entertainment; as they can always jump on to various diets/stuffs being offered on a platter, ranging from classic Hollywood teleseries to movies to reality (…)