Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Into That Heaven Of Freedom From Corruption, Let My Country Awake

  2 September 2011, by S G Vombatkere

  Over the past decades successive Union governments of various political hues have not even gotten to the stage of tabling a Lokpal Bill, and combined with a rash of monumental scams in the past couple of years, it has pushed the corruption issue on to the front page.
  The nation is agog with the face-off between what has come to be known as “Team Anna” led by Anna Hazare and the Congress-led UPA Union government on the subject of corruption, focussed as it is on the Jan Lokpal Bill (…)

• Congress does a Trick, BJP stages a Farce — and Corruption is Assured a Free Run

  2 September 2011, by T J S George

  It is now clear beyond all doubt: the Congress and the BJP are equally uninterested in fighting corruption.
  Actually both are interested in continuing it because both are beneficiaries of corruption. All talk about ending corruption and punishing the corrupt is just talk, meant to fool the public.
  The Congress showed its anti-anti-corruption state of mind by subverting the public demand for an effective Lokpal Bill and presenting a draft that was only slightly different from (…)

• August 1991 Coup Against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev : Analysis and Editorials by Nikhil Chakravartty

  2 September 2011, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  On August 19 this year was observed the twentieth anniversary of the coup against the then Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, by the hardliners in the Soviet Communist Party, an event that engendered a massive popular backlash in Russia and the entire USSR and expedited the demise of first the CPSU and then the Soviet Union itself, notwithstanding the fact that due to remarkable mass resistance the coup failed by (…)

• August 19-21, 1991: Three Days that Changed the Course of World History in 20th Century

  2 September 2011, by Arun Mohanty

  Few other events of the 20th century have changed the course of world history so abruptly as the so-called coup of August 1991 in Moscow that changed the geopolitics of the modern world so profoundly and so quickly. Without going into the details of the coup attempt it can definitely be said that the so-called plot no doubt accelerated the disintegration of the Soviet Union; brought about the end of the Cold War; and changed the global correlation of forces abruptly and unexpectedly. The (…)

• Post-Kan Scenarios in Japanese Politics

  2 September 2011, by Rajaram Panda

  Keeping his words to resign (announced two months ago), Japan’s Prime Minister Kan Naito is expected to resign by the end of August 2011 after the Diet passes two bills that he had set as conditions for his leaving office. This will set the stage for Japan’s sixth Prime Minister to take office in five years. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and Opposition combine of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and New Komeito agreed on August 9 to pass the legislation that would allow for (…)

• Time for a New Battle

  20 August 2011, by SC

  As we approach our sixtyfifth Independence Day there is no gainsaying that an acute sense of despondency has gripped the nation, thanks primarily to the acrobatics of our present-day rulers though it must be acknowledged in all candour that those in the Opposition have fared no better. In the absence of the stalwarts who participated in and/or led the freedom struggle and upheld the picture of a radiant India before, during and in the immediate aftermath of our independence from foreign (…)

• Latest Lokpal Bill — Vital Changes Still Needed

  20 August 2011, by Rajindar Sachar

  The much awaited Cabinet-approved Lokpal Bill is no surprise. The decision to exclude the Prime Minister is maintained, notwithstanding the proclaimed stand of Dr Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister since 2004, that he wants to be included, but he has had to yield because of the Cabinet decision. This surrender of one’s conscientious opinion on a matter of vital public importance at the altar of petty considerations of party politics ill serves the Prime Minister’s reputation because in spite (…)

• Reconciliation and Nation-building: the Mandela Way

  20 August 2011

  Ahmed Kathrada, leader of the anti-apartheid struggle and liberation movement of South Africa, was in New Delhi to take part in the Mandela Day Commemoration on July 18, when Madiba (as Nelson Mandela is lovingly called by his friends, followers and admirers all over the world) turned 93. Kathrada, who is 11 years younger than Madiba, spent 26 years in South African prisons, 18 of which were on Robben Island along with Mandela. Here Ahmed Kathrada tells Suhas Borker about how Mandela started (…)

• Dilemma of Democracy and Development in India

  20 August 2011, by Mani Shankar Aiyar

  For anyone of my generation, V.K. Krishna Menon was an iconic figure. His image suffered a body blow with the military disaster of October-November 1962 but any fair evaluation of the man and his contribution to the freedom struggle and post-Independence nation-building in the years that went before the hubris and then the closing years of his life must conclude with a tribute to his soaring patriotism, his determined defence of our right to an independent voice in a world unused to such (…)

• Supreme Court, Naxalism and Salwa Judam

  20 August 2011, by Ajay K. Mehra

  The debate over the PIL filed in 2007 by Nandini Sundar and others challenging the ‘creation’ of Salwa Judum (SJ), variously translated from the Gondwani dialect as peace march or peace movement, as an armed tribal ‘vigilante group’, has taken a new turn in several respects since the Supreme Court of India struck down the use of tribal youths as a supplementary counter-insurgency force on Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Aside from expectedly mixed reactions both in the media and the public, three (…)