Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• An Apology

  21 July 2013

  We sincerely apologise for a highly serious mistake which has occurred in the July 6, 2013 issue of Mainstream. The article, “Don’t belittle the Army, Mr Rambo-Nambo” (which also figures in the select list of articles displayed on the cover), was not written by Major-General (Retd.) Sudhir Vombatkere but Ms Priyanka Chaturvedi and appeared in the Tehelka blog on June 27. Major-General Vombatkere had sent it to us with the details of the Tehelka website. Unfortunately due an oversight we (…)

• Bodhgaya Bomb Blasts: Moving beyond the ‘Usual Suspects’

  21 July 2013, by Subhash Gatade

  I
  Encore!
  Mr Praveen Swamy has ‘discovered’ the ‘usual suspects’ once again.
  Narrating “[t]he same old, depressing story of incompetence and apathy” behind the Bodh-gaya bombings, he has shared with the readers how “[I]ndia’s police and intelligence services knew there were plots to attack the temple”
and how “... jihadists quite publicly announced they intended to attack Buddhist targets. ... From January, government sources have told Firstpost, the Intelligence Bureau had issued (…)

• Sitting in Awe of the West

  21 July 2013, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Development! Are we a developed lot? What development are we talking about, when there’s destruction spreading around. Not just along the hills and mountains, but in our very psyches. Suicides going up the graph, as emotional turbulences hit many more. And together with that, blatant killings taking place under those array of political shams. And those official announcements are made along a crude strain: Only two killed. Only 800 left stranded. About 20 washed away. Maybe just (…)

• Whistleblower for a Public Cause: Edward Snowden

  21 July 2013, by Ambrose Pinto

  One must admire and appreciate Edward Joseph Snowden, the 30-year-old former American technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), for his courage and willingness to risk his life for a public cause. It is not normal for a young man to exhibit that courage in the presence of a mighty state, a state that can even do away with his life.
  In sharing classified material on a variety of top-secret NSA (…)

• Uttarakhand Disaster: Development at What Cost?

  21 July 2013, by Sunita Vakil

  The devastating fury unleashed in the form of heavy rains, cloudburst, landslides and flash floods in Uttarakhand have taken a heavy toll on human lives and property. Thousands have been devastated and many structures have been swept away. Though the official figure of people who died in the tragedy has been put around 3000, the actual number may be much higher. The unprecedented tragedy has forced us to re-examine how the fragile ecology of the Himalayas has been exploited in the name of (…)

• Mistrust, thy Name is Politics

  21 July 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  In the penultimate year of nearly one-decade rule by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, I find the biggest casualty is the people’s confidence in political parties, particularly the ruling Congress. In fact, the public is so exasperated that it has come to believe that dishonesty and politics are synonymous and those who have come to politics have done so only to make money.
  I was aghast to find that many well-placed people have not contributed to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund (…)

• On the Severe Enviromental Disaster at Badrinath Shrine in Uttarakhand

  21 July 2013

  COMMUNICATION
  Recently there has been a very severe disaster in the State of UttaraKhand in the northern part of India. This region had been in controversy for over a decade due to the construction of several dams on the Ganga river and its various upland tributaries in the Himalayan region.
  These numerous small and big dams were constructed with great hurry but without proper hydrological, geological, hydraulics-related investigations including geological mappings and expected (…)

• West Bengal: Understanding Trinamul Congress

  21 July 2013

  by Pratip Chattopadhyay
  I
  The politics of the Trinamul Congress has always been a continued search for alternates —be it in leadership style, be it in managing the sentiments of the masses or be it in creating new promises in governance. However alter-nates never arise from a scratch—alternates are some additions upon the previous experiences —and hence one can always find a resonance of the CPI-M brand in some of the slogans of the TMC [amra kara?—”Trinamul”, jachhe kara? “Trinamul” (…)

• Media’s Anti-Mamata Campaign

  21 July 2013, by Barun Das Gupta

  Within a few months of her coming to power in 2011, a section of the media—print as well as electronic—started a campaign against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, trying to belittle whatever she was doing and show her in a bad light. Mamata’s temperament made their task easy. She is easily provoked. Her responses are quite often knee-jerk, her comments brusque and off-the-cuff. This lands her frequently in avoidable controversy like her dismissing last year’s incident of a rape in Park Street (…)

• A Third Front minus Mamata and CPI-M?

  21 July 2013

  by Arko Dasgupta
  With the Indian voter eagerly anticipating next year’s general elections for the 16th Lok Sabha, the talk of the town seems to be the viability of a Third Front—a coalition of non-Indian National Congress and non-Bharatiya Janata Party led-parties—to challenge the electoral dominance of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, to set up shop in Parliament. Details are sketchy but as of this moment the composition of this (…)