Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• American Tradition and the Concept of Human Rights in United States’ Foreign Policy

  12 December 2011, by Sunita Samal

  Introduction
  Human rights represent an ambitious attempt to bring rationality into the political institutions and civil society. Liberty and human rights are both a cause of the American Revolution (1776) and had been a purpose for drafting the United States’ Constitution. No idea aroused more hope and greater fear than the insistence on human rights in politics and society. The American Revolution, therefore, attracted attention because its leaders justified their action on the basis of (…)

• Kishenji’s Killing: Some Important Questions

  12 December 2011, by Diptendra Raychaudhuri

  Truth is seldom etched in black and white. Most often it is all grey.
  The attitude towards Kishenji, and all the works he carried out throughout his life, stands testimony to this. While to many he was a villain, to some others he was a hero, a character whom they saluted for the last time with the words ‘amar rahe’.
  His body was cremated on a Sunday, after it was handed to his family by the West Bengal Government. This is what Hindustan Times wrote about the cremation day:
  “The (…)

• Grim Warning from Bhopal

  12 December 2011, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  It was a massacre of innocents by all counts. What happened at the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal in the early morning of December 3 was not just a tragedy but a heinous crime which killed nearly two thousand and hospitalised countless others, brings out something much more ghastly than the hazards of modern industrialisation.
  The enormity of the crime—unprecedented in our times—lies not merely in any negligence on the part of the workers and superintending staff (…)

• Twentieth Century Socialism: Anti-Emancipatory, Enslaving

  12 December 2011

  by PARESH CHATTOPADHYAY
  Today there is a curious convergence of views between the Right and the dominant Left on the meaning of socialism. Put more concretely, for both the Right and dominant Left socialism refers to the system which came into being as a sequel to the conquest of political power by the Bolsheviks in Russia, 1917, and this system signifies a society governed by a single political party where the means of production are owned predominantly by the state and not privately, and (…)

• What was Built in the Soviet Union

  12 December 2011, by Randhir Singh

  By way of introduction to our discussion of what was or came to be built in the Soviet Union, I would like to share these two relatively recent statements from Paul Sweezy:
  I have no doubt whatever that the Russian Revolution and the ones that followed—with a few obvious exceptions like the Iranian revolution—were genuine socialist revolutions with deep roots in an international movement that traces its origin back to the first half of the nineteenth century. The parties and their leaders (…)

• A Romantic Intellectual

  12 December 2011, by D.K. Giri

  TRIBUTE
  He was not a name to conjure with nor did he make the grade, as it is commonly perceived, in this part of the world. He was neither a Minister nor a public figure, so that one could credit him with all that is popularly known to be the virtues of good, intelligent or successful. But Pradip Bose was one of the greatest souls and most brilliant minds that one ever knew. Having known him very closely for over three decades one could confidently say that he was an embodiment of (…)

• Major Work on Violent Conflict

  12 December 2011, by Rakesh Gupta

  BOOK REVIEW
  Ethnic Mobilisation and Violence in Northeast India. by Pahi Saikia; Routledge, London, New York, New Delhi; pages 231; Price: Rs 695.
  This book can be read in multiple ways. It is a work of an Indian trained for her doctorate in a foreign university (McGill) where questions are asked and answered in a thesis and new ground is prepared to provide an epistemo-logical turn to the existing literature. Pahi has consciously attempted to do this. The blurb promises to fill (…)

• Media Self-discipline? — No Comments

  12 December 2011

  by ATULKRISHNA BISWAS
  “Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.” —Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury (1887-1972)
  Votaries of democracy and advocates of freedom of expression would stand by press freedom, even though unrestrained in tone and tenor, and without a sycophantic note. A (…)

• Sure, We are a Happening Country, but What Shouldn’t Happen is Happening

  12 December 2011, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  “What is happening in this country?”—asked Pranab Mukherjee in the aftermath of the Sharad Pawar slapping incident.
  Every taxpayer and voter in this country has been asking the same question, though not in the sense in which Mukherjee meant. What indeed is happening under the auspices of the eminent leaders of the government and the Opposition? What the citizen knows is:
  • That dumb things are happening in the country. Like introducing the FDI retail decision at the most (…)

• Union Government Exposes Itself

  9 December 2011, by SC

  Parliament’s winter session, which began on November 22, has failed to transact any business till date. At present the deadlock in both the Houses is due to the Union Government’s obdurate stand on opening the retail sector to foreign direct investment (FDI)—51 per cent in multi-brand, 100 per cent in single brand. This has not only faced stiff resistance from the entire Opposition but also from UPA allies like the Trinamul and DMK as well as from within the Congress itself, and the ruling (…)