Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Sexual Assaults and Feminist Sensibilities

  1 July 2013, by Gilbert Sebastian

  COMMUNICATION
  Krishna Majumdar’s response (Mainstream, April 27, 2013) to my piece (“Patriarchy and the Rise in Sexual Assaults in India: An Explanation”, Mainstream, March 16, 2013) calls for certain clarifications as she has, at places, grossly misrepresented my views and has missed out the main thrust of my arguments. Moreover, her arguments reveal an orientation which is somewhat commonplace in the mainstream feminist movements in India, namely, its implicit privileged caste bias and (…)

• Jolt for NDA, ‘Himalayan Tsunami’

  22 June 2013, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  As national politics has taken a new turn with the JD(U) severing its 17-year-old ties with the BJP on June 16 on the lines of what had been forecast in this journal last week, the NDA led by the principal Opposition party in the country has suffered a real jolt regardless of the braggadocio of the top leadership in the Modi-inspired BJP.
  However, the BJP-JD(U) streetfights in Patna on June 18 in the course of the BJP’s Vishwasghat Diwas (Day of Betrayal), called to expose (…)

• Tribute: Satyapal Dang

  22 June 2013

  On June 15, 2013 legendary Communist leader Satyapal Dang, an outstanding and extraordinary personality of impeccable personal and political integrity who served the cause of the downtrodden and oppressed with steadfast dedication and unflinching zeal, breathed his last at the age of 93. His wife, Vimla, who stood by her husband through thick and thin as a loyal comrade-in-arms and herself fought many a battle with the same devotion as ‘Satpal’, as Dang was known to all his friends and (…)

• Who Killed My Daughter Ishrat Jehan?

  22 June 2013

  Statement by Shamima Kauser, Mother of Deceased Ishrat Jehan
  My daughter, Ishrat Jehan, was abducted, illegally confined and killed in cold blood by officers and men of the Gujarat Police in June 2004. She was killed as part of a larger conspiracy which had a political agenda. Ishrat’s murder was projected as an ‘encounter’ and justified by branding her a terrorist who had come with three other men to attack the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. This was not the first fake encounter (…)

• Narendra Modi on Sardar Patel: Putting Goebbels to Shame

  22 June 2013, by Shamsul Islam

  Gujarat Chief Minister and Hindutva icon Narendra Modi, while inaugurating an all-India conference on livestock and dairy development in Gandhinagar on June 11, 2013, announced a nationwide campaign to collect small pieces of iron from farmers and use them to build a ‘Statue of Unity’ in memory of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first Interior Minister of independent India in Nehru’s Cabinet.
  He announced: “On the day of Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary on October 31, 2013, we will launch a (…)

• New Push to Hindutva

  22 June 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  Politics in India may not be the same again. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has changed the agenda. It has introduced pure commu-nalism to the soft Hindutva that prevailed so far. By appointing the hardliner Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister, as the campaign panel chief for the 2014 parliament election, the party has dropped every bit of ambiguity over secularism. It is stark Hinduism for all to see.
  Apparently, the old leadership resisted the decision. Tall L.K. Advani had even (…)

• Media: News as Business Enterprise

  22 June 2013

  by Anil Chamadia
  The media is looking for money in news. And in the process, it has shed its veneer of being a source of information about what is happening around us. Rather, the media has been indulging in dispersal of ‘propaganda packaged as news’—an unethical practice which has come to be known as ’paid news’. Propagating an advertisement of a product/service after realising money through the media along with dispersal of news has been its revenue-earning model ever since the news (…)

• Pakistan: Wide-angle View

  22 June 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  It is but natural for us to view the recent General Elections in Pakistan by our time-worn standards and to assess whether it could be regarded as free and fair. There were certainly inadequacies, some of them serious—particularly the prelude to it which involved peremptory dismissal of a duly elected government followed by appointment of a caretaker government chosen by the President and a snap election in the midst of the Muslim month of Ramzan fasting. But any major (…)

• Why Indians Won’t Trust Henry Kissinger

  22 June 2013, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Recently Dr Henry Kissinger, the US National Security Adviser under President Richard Nixon, turned 90. On this occasion the author, a well-known diplomat and writer, assesses the role that Kissinger played vis-a-vis India in the seventies of the last century.
  Anyone who worked as a diplomat in the latter half of the 20th century would have his private story to tell regarding Henry Kissinger.
  So let me begin with mine, circa February 1972 in a cavernous room of the Union Public Services (…)

• DU’s Four Year Undergraduate Programme — The Politics of Exclusive Education

  22 June 2013

  by V.P. Jain
  Teachers and students in Delhi University are fiercely engaged in a wide-ranging debate over the rationale of the proposed four-year under-graduate course, to be introduced from the next academic session. The decision has ignited an intense national controversy by bringing the debate into the public sphere. Many teachers are vehemently opposed to the four year undergraduate programme (FYUP), charging the VC that the university has been brought to such a pass by the very (…)