Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Civil Society, Corruption and Social Change

  27 December 2011, by Anil Rajimwale

  The words ‘civil society’ have become quite popular lately, thanks mainly to the recent movement against corruption led by Anna Hazare. At least one good thing that has emerged is the consciousness and self-consciousness of the civil society, whatever may be its interpretation by various commentators. Unfortunately, for the most part, the term is being used without its real and scientific meaning.
  Scientific Interpretation
  CIVIL SOCIETY delimits that part of the society which is not (…)

• Valuable Addition to Literature on Election Studies

  27 December 2011, by Ranbir Singh

  BOOK REVIEW
  India: 2009 Elections—Coalition Politics, Party Competition and Congress Continuity by Paul Wallace and Ramashray Roy (ed.); Sage Publications, New Delhi; 2011; pages XVIII+412; Price Rs 995.
  This book is a continuation of the earlier election studies—Indian Politics and the 1998 Elections: Regionalisation, Hindutva and State Politics (1999); India’s 1999 Elections and the 20th Century Politics (2003), India’s 2004 Elections: Grassroots and National Perspectives (2007)—which (…)

• Impact of Unabated Anthropogenic Activities on the Ganga-Yamuna system

  27 December 2011, by Sudhanshu Bhandari

  RIVER, RIVER SURELY DYING
  It was at the 1981 session of the Indian Science Congress in Varanasi that scientists expressed concern at the growing chemical and biological pollution in the river Ganga in presence of the then Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi. As a result of her initiative, the Planning Commission asked the Central Board for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution, New Delhi to conduct studies on the state of the river Ganga. In collaboration with the State Pollution Control (…)

• Mayawati’s Gerrymandering: Fourfold Division of UP

  27 December 2011, by A K Biswas

  The State of Uttar Pradesh—at the bottom in the club of India’s sick States, BIMARU1—seems to stand at a crossroad. The UP Assembly has adopted a resolution on November 21, 2011 for a fourfold division of the State, which, according to the latest census, boasts of 19,95,81,477 persons. This size makes it the nation’s most populous State. Since the mid-eighties, an acronym BIMARU resembling a Hindi word “Bimar”, meaning sick, has come to signify a group of north and north-western States, that (…)

• Kashmir: Whither Strategy?

  27 December 2011

  by ALI AHMED
  It is often said that India does not have a strategic culture, implying that it is unable to think strategically. In other words, it cannot match ‘means’ with ‘ends’, or perhaps it is incapable of arriving at aims in the first place. The counter-argument usually heard is that if that were the case, then India would by now have been—as Churchill once famously but mistakenly put it—merely a ‘geographical expression’. The controversy surrounding the Armed Forces Special Powers (…)

• Terrorists can also Bestow Favours

  27 December 2011, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The twin terrorist strikes on Tuesday (December 6, 2011) on Shi’ite worshipers in the Afghan capital Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-i-Shairf, killing 58 people, are an extraordinary event. Even in the darkest days of violence during the past decade, Afghanistan never descended to sectarian violence.
  The easy thing to do is to blame the Taliban. But Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid quickly condemned the “wild and inhuman attack by our enemies, who are trying to blame us and are (…)

• Indo - Pak Relationship and Urdu: Companions in a Paradoxical Syndrome

  27 December 2011

  by ATHER FAROUQUI
  The state of the Urdu language and its literature in India, which, in its existing form, cannot play any positive role in Indo-Pak relations, forms the theme of this paper. By analysing contemporary socio-political conditions, I will argue that any expectation from Urdu, particularly its literature in India, in the context of Indo-Pak relations would not be very sagacious. At the most it can only serve the purpose of socialites and frivolous academics who get grants from (…)

• Dr Radhakrishnan’s Contribution to Contemporary Thought

  27 December 2011, by Vinod Anand

  Dr S. Radhakrishanan has a place of eminence amongst the most important thinkers of the contemporary world of philosophy and creative ideas. A man of very rare intellectual endowments, his fame rests securely on his creative interpreter of the comprehensive religious and philosophical traditions of India and of the West. What distinguishes him here is the distinctiveness and depth of interpretive power and his clear, resonant style of exposition, which together form a very important aspect (…)

• Durban Census: Prime Concern was Economy, not Environment

  27 December 2011

  by BIJOY KAR
  The Durban Climate Conference’s show of consensus has a bigger reason. Despite the world media’s tendency, the din over Durban could not match the “going, going, gone” screams from Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Co over the failing Euro-zone, and the snowballing crisis over the West going bust pretty fast. Surprisingly, the countries that once championed globalisation appear to be the victims of globalisation as a new power house emerges. The BRICS have arrived, despite (…)

• Only Reacting, Not Acting

  27 December 2011, by Mukul Dube

  This piece of writing is inspired by a long telephone conversation with Harsh Kapoor (South Asia Citizens’ Wire, Communalism Watch, etc.) which followed a public meeting of Champa—the Amiya and B.G. Rao Foundation — at which the speakers were Manisha Sethi and Kumar Ketkar. I shall focus on the implications of what I see as the main issues discussed.
  Sethi, who is perhaps best known for her work related to the Batla House “encounter” of 2008, spoke of what has become the established (…)