Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• AFSPA: Who Rules India?

  26 February 2013

  by Walter Fernandes
  Finally a senior Union Minister has made official what many knew already. The government cannot even make the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) more human because the Army does not want it diluted, leave alone repealed. In his K. Subrahmanyam Memorial Lecture on February 6, 2013 at the Institute of Defence Studies, P. Chidambaram said: “We can’t move forward because there is no consensus. The present and former Army Chiefs have taken a strong position that the Act (…)

• Khurshid’s Challenge to Antony is Intriguing

  26 February 2013, by M K Bhadrakumar

  This is carnival time for the detractors of Defence Minister A. K. Antony. Of course, none of them in their senses would dare to implicate Antony in the VVIP helicopter scandal. He remains the ‘Saint’. The saving grace in the present scandal is that Antony is relentlessly cracking the whip.
  Obviously, getting Antony out of the way has been an obsession for the pimps and dalals who feed on defence deals. Their lament and criticism has been that Antony is too slow in decision-making on arms (…)

• Will the Land Acquisition Bill lead to More Violent Conflicts?

  26 February 2013, by Ambrose Pinto

  There have been violent conflicts on land acquisition across the country especially when the land of the poor has been taken away without proper compensation by the state for public and private ventures. In all stories of acquisition it is the land mafia that has come to play a crucial role in pauperising the ordinary villagers and farmers and evicting them from their land with meagre compensation. In the major cities of India there are “estate agents” with gangs who threaten and intimidate (…)

• How to Extinguish Bodo-Muslim Conflict and other Ethnic Conflicts in Assam

  26 February 2013, by Syed Shahabuddin

  According to the tentative results of Census 2011, Assam with an area 78,438 square kilometres has a multi-ethnic population of 31.2 million, distributed in 27 districts. It is said to have 72 identifiable communities including a large number of ethnic tribes who have their own religion and language, though many of them have been culturally Hinduised. The Bodos are the biggest tribe, claiming to be the original inhabitants; they are scattered all over the State but concentrated in the (…)

• Theorising Corruption in a Hurry

  26 February 2013, by Badri Raina

  From all the elaborations that have now come forth, it would seem that this is what the sadly beleaguered Ashish Nandy had meant to say at the Jaipur Festival: that for thousands of years corruption has been the preserve of the upper castes, but the fact now that India’s Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes, and increasingly Scheduled Tribes as well are vigorous participants in this handed-down practice testifies to the energy of the ongoing social revolution in contemporary India. (…)

• The Follies of Empire: America in Iraq and Afghanistan

  26 February 2013, by Eddie J Girdner

  REVIEW ARTICLE
  Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2006. Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2012.
  The author is a journalist who writes for the Washington Post. These two recent books reveal many interesting details about America’s two latest imperial ventures. America is an empire, as the late Chalmers Johnson documented so well in his (…)

• Direct Cash Transfer: Who Does It Benefit?

  26 February 2013, by S G Vombatkere

  The following article was written sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
  Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) of subsidy to domestic LPG consumers starts on February 15, 2013, when LPG agencies will supply LPG refills on upfront cash payment of the full (unsubsidised) cost of the refill. The subsidy amount will be credited to the consumer’s bank account based on the consumer’s UID-Aadhaar number provided to the LPG agency and the bank. DCT is enabled by implementing (…)

• Re-reading Modi’s Gujarat

  26 February 2013, by Arup Kumar Sen

  The eminent political psychologist, Ashis Nandy, made some insightful observations on Gujarat and Narendra Modi in 2008, and those seem prophetic in the wake of Modi’s recent victory in the Assembly elections in 2012. It may be mentioned in this connection that a petition of criminal offence was filed against Nandy for his critical observations carried in The Times of India. Nandy argued that even if Narendra Modi had lost the last elections (2007), it would not have made much difference to (…)

• Report of a Survey on National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Panchayats

  26 February 2013, by Bidyut Mohanty

  The following is the report of a survey conducted by the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi on the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Panchayats.
  Introduction
  Just like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) is another rights-based and flagship programme, which was introduced from 2005 to 2012 in 18 States to improve the health delivery system in rural areas. It was introduced by the Ministry of Health (…)

• A Truly Courageous Woman, Hindutva Terror

  26 February 2013, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  Qamar Azad Hashmi passed away recently. She was Shabnam, Safdar, Sohail, Sabiha and Shehla’s mother and ‘ammaji’ to the rest of us … I had interviewed her on earlier occasions. She spoke fearlessly and one could discuss just about anything with her—right from politics prevailing in the continents across the world to that barbarism unleashed by the American-Allied forces, to the horrifying violent eruptions taking place, to those personal upheavals. And, yes, even the educational (…)