Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tribute: D. R. Goyal

  15 February 2013, by SC

  Desh Raj Goyal, 84, passed away in New Delhi after a brief illness in the afternoon of February 3, 2013. A veteran journalist and academic, he was the editor of Secular Democracy. From 1963 to 1967 he edited Mainstream. He leaves behind his son Ashit. His wife and younger son had predeceased him.
  We had invited him to attend a meeting at the India International Centre, New Delhi on January 29 to mark fifty years of Mainstream with a discussion on ‘Indian Media Scene Today: Potential and (…)

• Communal Challenge to Free India: Some Reminiscences and Reflections

  15 February 2013

  by D. R. Goyal
  For a person nurtured in the RSS culture it was not possible to share the euphoria touched off by the advent of independence. All the more so in Punjab which was bearing the brunt of partition.
  I did not belong to that part of Punjab which became part of Pakistan but I had been reading newspapers which first gave expression to the anxiety that gripped the Hindus in that area. As the historic day approached, expression of anxiety gave place to tales of horror, of murder and (…)

• Women’s Victory: Justice Verma Committee Report and the Road Ahead

  15 February 2013, by Pamela Philipose

  If the gang-rape of a 23-year-old student—on a Delhi bus on December 16, 2012—led to a sense of both outrage over and despair about the entrenched violence women experience in India, the Report of the Justice Verma Committee —emerging exactly five weeks after that incident —came as a heartening glimmer of hope for reform and justice.
  The response of women’s activists to the Report was unanimous: It was, potentially, a game-changer and transformed the manner in which the issue has been (…)

• Violating the Vulnerable—
Manifestations and Attitudes

  15 February 2013, by S G Vombatkere

  The latest spurt in crime is focussed on rape, brutal rape, brutal gang-rape. Women who resist rape and fight back are brutally mauled after being raped. In the December 16, 2012, Delhi bus gang-rape case (referred to as the “Damini case” hereinafter), one of the rapists allegedly tore out the young woman’s uterus with his bare hand. It would be insulting beasts to call these acts bestial. Men who commit rape are morally and socially at the depths of depravity and viciousness, the lowest of (…)

• Is India the Most Dangerous Place
 for Dalit Women?

  15 February 2013, by A K Biswas

  “A wave of sexual assaults has rocked the northern Indian State of Haryana. In the last one month alone, a dozen, mostly Dalit, girls and women have been raped, raising concerns about the security of women in India.” Thus went in the air a breaking news of the German television, Deutsche Welle DW TV, which is an international public broadcaster, under the headline “Sonia Gandhi promises to act as series of rapes shocks India.”1 Broadcasts of the DW are carried in 39 languages including (…)

• Of Wolves and Men

  15 February 2013, by Badri Raina

  It is a great mystery to me why wolves should have been saddled with the ill repute of being sexual predators.
  My experience of reading about animals and watching with commitment the many excellently researched documentaries about them on the chain of Discovery channels, including the National Geographic, teaches me this: that no animal, the wolf included, ever forces himself upon an unwilling or unready female of his species. Without a single exception.
  The only animal that does so (…)

• Rising Incidents of Rape in India: Problem and Solutions

  15 February 2013

  by Sudhanshu Tripathi
  Whether accompanied by violence or not, rape is, in fact, one of the most heinous, savage and lifelong agony and also trauma-inflicted brutalities perpetrated on women, and a complete violation of her self-respect and dignity leaving not only permanent physical injury but also incurable mental scars. Her sense of humiliation and utter powerlessness at the time causes such abysmal inner throes to her heart which are far more difficult to heal than the external blots on (…)

• Pakistan is Too Serious a Problem to be left to our TV Anchors

  15 February 2013, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Pakistan is in deep trouble. So it is pushing India into deep trouble. Our own professional patriots are pushing India into deeper trouble. The great television anchors would love nothing more than a full-fledged war, now, at this very moment, so that their ratings would go up. Some of our politicians too want their ratings to rise. A senior leader said that for one soldier’s head that Pakistan cut off, we must cut off ten Pakistani soldiers’ heads. This is how patriotism makes (…)

• When the Politician Fails

  15 February 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  With the onset of summer, the Indian scene has perceptibly changed in the last few weeks, adding to its complexities as also to its instability.
  In the eyes of many, the rumblings against the RSS inside the Janata camp reaching the point of a challenge against it on the part of the BLD-Socialist-CFD combine was considered a significant development and it was expected to facilitate the forging of an entente with all Congressmen committed to fight against the return of (…)

• Shinde Spoils Rahul’s Launch

  15 February 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  January 30 is the day when Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic for the partition of India. Nathuram Godse, who killed him, remained unrepentant and said in his defence in the Punjab High Court, where the case was heard: “Gandhi was a hypocrite. Even after the massacre of the Hindus by the Muslims, he was happy. The more the massacres of Hindus, the taller (he raised) his flag of secularism.”
  India paid a heavy price to uphold the values of pluralism. Yet a similar kind of (…)