Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Heightened Tensions in POSCO Project Area

  28 April 2013

  DOCUMENT
  Fact-Finding Report on the Situation in the Wake of Bomb Blast in Jagatsinghpur District, Odisha
  Executive Summary
  On March 9, 2013, a 12-member team consisting of human rights activists, journalists, academicians, democratic rights and civil liberty activists, conducted a fact-finding visit to the Patana and Gobindapur villages of the Dhinkia Panchayat in the Jagatsinghpur district of Odisha. On March 2, 2013, a bomb blast took place in the Patana village and three people (…)

• In Response to Dr Gilbert Sebastian

  28 April 2013, by Krishna Majumdar

  COMMUNICATION
  This is in response to the article published in Mainstream on March 16, 2013, "Patriarchy and the Rise of Sexual Assaults in India: An Explanation" by Dr Gilbert Sebastian.
  Violence against women is a fact of life in India, as indeed in most parts of the world. As Dr Sebastian rightly points out, from female foeticide to infanticide, from domestic violence to molestation to sexual assault, females are neither safe unborn or born, inside the home or out of it. Undoubtedly a (…)

• Why Iran is Crucial for Both India and Pakistan

  28 April 2013

  by Tridivesh Singh Maini and Usman Shahid
  The following article has been sent to us by Usman Shahid, a Pakistani national, from Lahore. He and Tridivesh Singh Maini (who is an Indian) have recently co-authored a book on Indo-Pak people-to-people contact to be published soon.
  The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline turned out to be the swan song of the Zardari Government as the President formally inaugurated the so- called peace pipeline project worth $ 7.5 billion with his Iranian counterpart on (…)

• How India is Turning into China

  28 April 2013

  Noted writer Pankaj Mishra wrote the following piece that appeared in The New Republic (December 21, 2012) from where it is being reproduced, with due acknowledgement, alongwith a response from retired IFS officer Saurabh Kumar for the benefit of our readers.
  by Pankaj Mishra
  China is shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade (…)

• Comments on "How India is Turning into China"

  28 April 2013, by Saurabh Kumar

  The article brings to bear the writer’s formidable skills for broad-brush painting of the contemporary scene with a keen eye on history to give us some valuable insights about the commonalities in the current travails of the two “rising” Asian powers that had set out on lofty historical missions more or less together, albeit with contrasting political systems—the “profound crisis of legitimacy” confronting them both, above all.
  Attributing the “growing resemblance” to the state in India (…)

• Political Reading of "Well Done Abba" a Tale of Our Times

  28 April 2013

  by Raj Kumar Thakur
  The very idea that one’s self is independent from the larger socio-political realities is very clearly brought under scrutiny—instead what emerges is connected lives, with water, the chief source of life, being at the core of the movie. Armaan Ali, the chief protagonist of the movie, comes out a champion, a champion who goes beyond the very idea of self, his rebellion a marker of restlessness and dissatisfaction on the part of the common man. The idea of the common (…)

• A Rejoinder to Grover Furr: Points Not Met

  28 April 2013, by Anil Rajimwale

  COMMUNICATION
  I went through Grover Furr’s reply (Mainstream, April 6, 2013) to my comments. Unfortunately, he meets none of the points raised by me, and repeats his views mechanically without dialec-tical logic and arguments. Everybody is, of course, entitled to one’s views. But when one is arguing a point or points, one should at least try to meet them. Simple and general statements do not help resolving issues. Besides, most unfortunately, Furr has gone personal and has attacked me as (…)

• Ilaiah’s Tilak is Communal to the Core

  28 April 2013

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Poornima Joshi
  Untouchable God by Kancha Ilaiah; Publishers: Samya; pages: 248; Price: Rs 350.
  Kancha Ilaiah is not an easy scholar to digest, with his brutal polemic against the Brahminical dominance of the Indian caste order. His latest assault, appropriately titled Untouchable God, is a progression of the unique line of argument he has forwarded since he burst onto the Indian sociological scene with his seminal work Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva (…)

• Boston and Bengaluru, Growing BJP-JD(U) Rift

  22 April 2013, by SC

  Two days after twin blasts near the finish line of the famous Boston marathon shattered the post-9/11 calm in the US killing three persons (including an eight-year-old) and injuring close to 170, 17 of them critically, the powerful explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) outside the BJP headquarters in Bengaluru’s Malleswaram area at 10.28 am this morning has injured 16 people, among them eight policemen; the IED is reported to have been placed in or around the petrol tank of a (…)

• Who Can Take On Narendra Modi?

  22 April 2013, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Narendra Modi seems doing nothing much to his semi-parched and drought hit State; in fact, focusing only on giving speeches to a select crowd of New Delhi. Before I write any further, it seemed more than apparent that his hosts double-checked the invite list and made sure that together with the business movers and shakers, only the Right-wing elements or those fence-sitters be invited. No, the outspoken lot of this Capital city was kept far away from Modi and his men. Why? Just in (…)