Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Impeach the Magna Carta, not Judges

  5 November 2011, by K G Somasekharan Nair

  A judge of the Calcutta High Court, Justice Soumitra Sen, had been summoned up by the Rajya Sabha on August 18, 2011 to switch on the impeachment process on certain allegations levelled against him. The judge being subjected to impeachment and the members impeaching him scourged at the judiciary with different perspectives apocalyptically. The words of the perspicacious judge under shadow may be ignored as it may be his last subterfuge. But criticisms unleashed by the members of the Rajya (…)

• Wake-up Call for Congress and Allies in UPA

  25 October 2011, by SC

  The results of the by-polls in the four States of Haryana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar have clearly demonstrated the wide gulf separating the principal constituent of the ruling coalition at the Centre from the public at large. Not only has the UPA lost all the seats, the Congress candidates could not save their security deposits in the Hisar Lok Sabha by-election in Haryana and the Darounda Assembly by-poll in Bihar, since they came a distant third in both the contests. (…)

• Damodar Valley Corporation’s Inhuman Treatment of Tribals

  25 October 2011, by Girish Mishra

  The DVC (Damodar Valley Corporation) is one of the oldest and prestigious river valley projects in which Jawaharlal Nehru took very keen interest. It was intended to provide irrigation facilities and generate electricity so that both agricultural development and industrialisation of two important States, namely, West Bengal and Bihar (now Jharkhand), would get a big boost. Not only would agricultural and industrial production increase but lots of jobs would also be generated in the services (…)

• ‘Occupy Wall Street’—Sit-in at the Seat of Global Capitalism and Corrupt Corporate Power

  25 October 2011

  The following was the lead piece in ML update, the weekly news magazine of the CPI-ML (Liberation), in its issue of October 11 to 17, 2011. It is being reproduced with due acknowledgement.
  For the past three weeks, a very remarkable protest has been unfolding at the heart of the US economic power and global capitalism. Thousands of American people have ‘occupied’ a site near Wall Street, and hundreds of solidarity actions and sit-ins have followed both in the US and in other countries. (…)

• Wall Street Spring: Americans Demand Democracy

  25 October 2011

  by SASWAT PATTANAYAK
  The homeless and the Hippies, the socialists and the students, the communists and the commoners—the Wall Street has been occupied for good by the countless human beings demanding dignity of life denied to them under American capitalism. Every disenfranchised minority is now decrying the citadel of private capital, greed and monstrosity. And contrary to White House assertions and corporate media verdicts, the defamed Wall Street has been denied a bail-out—by the people (…)

• A Blueprint for the Revival and Expansion of the Left Movement

  25 October 2011, by Syed Shahabuddin

  The Indian polity needs the Left in order not only to provide an alternative to the Right, represented by the BJP and the Congress, but to stop close cooperation between the two which has of late seen new dimensions of collaboration on several political, economic and social issues. Who knows they may eventually form a coalition around a common social constituency and support of the market economy?
  Political Status
  IN the General Election 2009, the Left representation was reduced. In the (…)

• Super Radicals and Anna Hazare

  25 October 2011, by D.R. Chaudhry

  This refers to an article “The Neoliberal Revolution” by Anand Teltumbde (Mainstream, September 17, 2011) in which he has lampooned the Hazare movement against corruption as a well-crafted stratagem in counter-revolution. The article gives the impression that the Indian revolution was on march and about to knock at the portals of Red Fort when a naïve and befuddled Gandhian put a halt to it and thus played a treacherous role for the toiling masses of India. The Anna team’s movement against (…)

• Anna’s Anti-Congressism

  25 October 2011

  by A.K. VERMA
  The recent strategy of team Anna to take the Congress by the horns in the Hisar Lok Sabha by-poll took the party completely by surprise and bewilderment. This is evident from the fact that the Congress chose to over-react to Anna’s anti-Congressism. From Team Anna’s perspective, the move was designed to test the possible outcome of the civil society taking on the political society on corruption and Jan Lokpal in the larger arena of political contestations in five States next (…)

• Is Anna Hazare an Agent of the Right-wing?

  25 October 2011, by Ambrose Pinto

  Anna Hazare has given a call to the people of Hisar to vote out the Congress from the constituency in the by-election. The only reason for his campaign against the Congress is that the party has not given him in writing that it would back his Jan Lokpal Bill to be passed in the next session of Parliament. The BJP and some other smaller parties have assured their support to Anna in writing. Is Anna justified in asking for letters of support from political parties when a note was provided to (…)

• Parliament and People are Both Supreme

  25 October 2011, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s opinion-piece on the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests could as well have been written about the Indian political elites’ visceral reaction to Anna Hazare’s war on corruption. Look at the similarities. Both are manifestations of the popular revulsion against greed—“the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a per cent”, as Krugman writes.
  Obviously, there has been a lot of “police (…)