Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Anna Hazare’s Protest: Some Reflections on Law-Making, Parliament and Democracy in India

  6 September 2011, by Preeti Chauhan

  Anna Hazare’s protest raises many other important issues than just the issue of a Jan Lokpal. There can be very serious differences on how best to tackle corruption, a powerful law being just one part of it. But what must be seriously discussed, debated and analysed thoroughly are the many questions regarding democracy in India that this protest and the attack on it has thrown up.
  One of the major premises of the government’s or rather the ruling elite’s attack on Anna Hazare’s campaign (…)

• Blind Manmohanomics and a Billion Mutinies

  6 September 2011, by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

  Anna Hazare is not every Indian’s flavour of the month. Many question his tactics and strategy of battling the government version of the Lokpal Bill. All ordinary Indians do not endorse the way in which he and his colleagues are carrying on the movement for a corruption-free India. On its side the government’s and Congress party’s leadership has tried hard to impress upon the people that the Jan Lokpal Bill, the version of the Bill put forward by Anna Hazare and his colleagues, is one legal (…)

• The Enigmatic Hazare

  6 September 2011, by Ambrose Pinto

  “The interest in life does not lie in what people do, not even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps, persuadable, which one may call life in general.” Those words of Virginia Woolf would best describe Anna Hazare at this juncture. In the complex politics of contradictions, he has found a larger than life place and he is heard with very little to communicate. He is not his own making. He is the (…)

• The Left and the Anna Movement

  6 September 2011

  by NIVEDITA MENON
  WE SHOULD BE THERE
  My head has been in a whirl the past few days with a single question – how do we on ‘the Left’ manage so unerringly to be exactly where ‘the people’ are not, time after time?
  At this moment I don’t mean the organised Left, for the Left parties have been cautious about criticising the current upsurge; they strongly defended the right to democratic protest when Anna Hazare and his colleagues were arrested, and now have launched a Third Front (…)

• Three Components of Jan Lokpal Campaign

  6 September 2011, by Nirmalangshu Mukherji

  [The following is a piece the author wrote as a response to an article by Gail Omvedt. Since that article is not being carried here, we have omitted references to it in the first few lines. Otherwise the article has been used in full. —Editor]
  I think the older generation of Left activists are by and large failing to come to terms with an unfamiliar form of protest in the IT-age. For them perhaps, Tahrir Square looks full of promise at a distance from where all the finer dark spots get (…)

• Understanding the Heart and Soul of Anna Hazare’s Movement

  6 September 2011

  by VINITA DESHMUKH
  The snobbery of intellectual writers and insensitivity of the political class comes as a shame at this defining moment in our country’s history. Let’s show some respect to this mass awakening, so essential for a vibrant democracy and a pro-active citizenry.
  Propagators of mass hysteria and mobocracy have one thing in common—they refuse to get out of their mindset and understand the new wave of mass participation, so essential for a vibrant democracy, that is now (…)

• Corruption

  6 September 2011, by Khurshid Alam

  The sprawling CWG’s stadium unfolded A large spectrum of corruption running into megabucks The CWG stadium— The doom of festivity, the doom of fidelity
  2G spectrum stood towering even higher That echoed clangour of corruption even louder.
  Heaps of corruption— Corruption after corruption. United people to roar against corruption All seem to support the campaigns that some Gandhians initiated. I too added my voice against.
  I was given the responsibility to enlist some corruptions And (…)

• Hazare-Card and the Government

  6 September 2011, by Nilofar Suhrawardy

  Would it be fair to assume that Anna Hazare and his team have scored a major victory by apparently compelling the Parliament to yield to their demands? Undeniably, the Central Government has given the impression of having conceded to the Hazare team by holding a special parliamentary session to discuss Hazare’s demands. At the end of the day (August 27), it was agreed by all parliamentarians to convey a “sense” of the Parliament to the Standing Committee scrutinising the Bill. The issues (…)

• Some Thoughts on Corruption

  6 September 2011, by Mukul Dube

  A friend (another grouchy old man like me) says that it is impossible to wipe out corruption in India. He says that we Indians always want things out of turn, we want things and privileges to which we are not entitled, that we are unwilling to wait for others or with them. He gives the example of a queue at a post office, which is never straight and orderly because no one wants to wait his turn and so tries to jump ahead. Another example is the car driver who is not content to stay behind (…)

• ‘Common Man’ versus ‘Invisible Man’ through the Prism of Anna Movement

  6 September 2011, by Diptendra Raychaudhuri

  Karl Marx talked about class divisions and two warring classes. I assume that was valid in his time. But it had lost its relevance since long. The society has got divided in tens of classes in a country like India. And if the society has so many classes, one cannot organise it according to Marxian thoughts characterised by class interest.
  But, of late, these tens of classes have organised themselves in two broad categories in our country: one category is referred to as the ‘common man’; (…)