Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• The New Face of Judicial Activism

  25 July 2011, by Arup Kumar Sen

  In writing the history of judicial activism in India at the beginning of the 21st century, Prof S.P Sathe noted that the political establishment has used the Court to legitimise its own decisions. He noted in this context that the Gujarat Government moved a contempt petition against the Narmada Bachao Andolon (NBA) for its members’ threat to die with the villagers whose villages were going to be submerged because of the rise in the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Actually, the decision of (…)

• Bodyguards: Emerging Apprehensions, Reasons and Redressal

  25 July 2011

  by PIRZADA M. AMIN and ADFAR RASHID SHAH
  After Salman Taseer’s murder by his own bodyguard in Pakistan a few months ago, yet another guard, Sardar Mohammad, has killed President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, pumping three bullets into him.
  Sociologically speaking, militia as an institution in South Asia, and especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, is breaking the cocoon of professio-nalism and staunch and reliable military discipline. The prime factors responsible may (…)

• Taliban Explain Ahmad Wali’s Killing

  25 July 2011, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The Taliban have issued a statement offering an explanation for the assassination in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar of Ahmad Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of President Hamid Karzai.
  This statement was released on Thursday (July 14)—the same day a suicide bomber disrupted the memorial service in Kandahar for Ahmad Wali, killing three people, including Maulawi Ekmatullah, the head of the local ulema shura (Provincial Religious Council).
  Earlier, the burial of Ahmad Wali on (…)

• Systems Exist to Detect Terrorist Plans; but we Focus on Cabinet Shuffle Tricks

  25 July 2011, by T J S George

  The Cabinet reshuffle—essentially a defeatist’s exercise—had raised major issues concerning the morality of coalition politics and the govern-ment’s very approach to governance. The ensuing public discourse reflected serious worries across the political spectrum about the way the country was going. Presumably that debate could have at least led to a clearer understanding of how not to handle high responsibility.
  But suddenly debate is disrupted, life itself is derailed and everybody’s (…)

• SCO: The Great Game Expands

  25 July 2011

  by BHAVNA SINGH
  The 10th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Astana (Kazakhstan) concluded with the members hailing the ‘Shanghai Spirit’ in determining a ‘new security order’ in Asia and adopting multilateral management as their future agenda. Several agreements were signed to promote regional trade and economic cooperation. The summit proposed to establish an energy club, an SCO development bank and a food security cooperation mechanism in order to encourage regional (…)

• Man-Elephant Conflict: Animal Rights are Akin to Human Rights

  25 July 2011, by Bharti Chhibber

  Of late I was intrigued by two separate headings on the front page of a local newspaper. “Tusker strays into Mysore city, kills one, injures four”. Another one goes: “Two elephants seriously hurt after being hit by train in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district”. What are we talking about? It highlights ‘man-animal conflict’. Man-animal conflict occurs when animals damage agri-cultural crops and property, kill livestock or attack people because of degradation and fragmentation of wildlife (…)

• Wiping Out Transparency

  25 July 2011, by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey

  If actions speak louder than words, then the government has just spoken loud and clear. There could be no stronger indication of the government’s lack of serious intent in building an effective anti-corruption regime than the decision to remove the Central Bureau of Investi-gation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) law.
  Without any discussion in the public domain, the government has decided to use Section 24 of the RTI Act to exempt the CBI—a decision with (…)

• They Made a Difference — Of Papiya Ghosh and Patrick Geddes

  25 July 2011

  by NARAYANI GUPTA
  There are individuals who have made a difference – to other individuals, to a community, to a nation. Hence the cliché “His/her name will go down in history.” But we must take into account how much time an individual is given. The reason I am here today, in a city I last knew in 1946, is because we are meeting to remember an individual who was born in 1953, whose life was brutally cut down when she was 53. The subject of my lecture is another individual, born almost (…)

• India’s North-South Socio-Cultural Divide: Which Way Now?

  25 July 2011, by Arup Maharatna

  In a long-lasting pan-Indian narrative of caste and its stereotypes, the question of spatial variations had remained sidelined especially until the early 1980s when a distinct regional contrast in kinship, marriage, and female status between north/north-western regions and the large southern peninsula of India began to be brought to the limelight in social science discourse. In this view, the ‘north’ is depicted as having more starkly patriarchal kinship, with such (unenviable) concomitants (…)

• The Twilight Zone

  25 July 2011, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  Half-way through the crucial elections to the State Assemblies, with Arjun Singh having been expelled from the Congress, it is a twilight zone of Indian politics. Reactions are many and varied, expectations galore.
  The fact that Narasimha Rao has suddenly exerted himself in both his avatars—as the Congress President making a short shrift of Arjun Singh throwing him out of the party, and as the Prime Minister going in for the long-awaited induction into the (…)