Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Union Budget 2011-12: Please All, Please None

  16 March 2011

  by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
  Pranab Mukherjee is the most seasoned politician in the present government. He was the Finance Minister more than a quarter-century ago when Manmohan Singh was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He has seen economic policy in the country change over the decades. In this year’s Budget, he has conveyed an impression that he is trying to walk the proverbial tightrope by seeking to please everyone and his brother. That’s not an easy task in the best of times. (…)

• Union Budget 2011-12: The Road Ahead

  16 March 2011, by Anshuman Gupta

  Many economic changes have occurred in India after the year 1991, supposed to be a watershed year in the economic history of India. These changes can even be observed at the budget level as well. They mainly include change in the people’s attitude to the Budget, enhance-ment in the eagerness of the people for the Budget, and change in the seriousness of the government to the Budget.
  Elaborating briefly on these three conspicuous changes, first, now the common man waits for the Budget (…)

• Our Lost Moral Universe

  16 March 2011, by T J S George

  There is no sign that “our shrinking moral universe” will stop shrinking any time soon. Politicians and bureaucrats, even Nityanandas and Kalmadis, do not betray the slightest sense of shame although the earth is littered with the debris of their sins.
  See what happened when the Bofors skeleton rattled again in the cupboard. Every Indian knows that it was the first big kickback case in India and who paid the moneys and who received them and who were the middlemen. The blatancy with which (…)

• How Not to Tackle the Black Economy in India

  16 March 2011, by Arun Kumar

  Technically, we know how to check the black economy but the problem is political. More studies or committees and treaties with foreign governments are only to stall action.
  Another Joint Parliamentary Committee has been announced. The government has been trying to create an impression of being proactive with regard to tackling the black economy. The President’s address and the speech by Sonia Gandhi in January mentioned the need to curb it. The Prime Minister at various fora, while (…)

• MDGs: India Has A Long Way To Go

  16 March 2011, by Suranjita Ray

  The recent Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Review Summit in New York, the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the United Nations Human Development Report 2010 serve as reminders for the urgent need to narrow the inequalities and disparities within and between countries to foster balanced development. Ten years on from the MDGs’ declaration to halve poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empowerment of women, reduce child mortality and improve maternal (…)

• The Story of ‘Palestine Papers’

  16 March 2011, by Sujata Ashwarya Cheema

  We didn’t need the leaked Palestine Papers—more than 1600 internal Palestinian documents summarising negotiations with Israel over the past decade—to know that the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is all but dead. The absence of a Palestinian state after nearly twenty years of the peace process hardly tells a different story. What comes shining through from these documents, however, is the courage of the Palestinian leaders in offering far-reaching concessions to their (…)

• Plea for an Alternative Development Plan for West Bengal

  16 March 2011, by Barun Das Gupta

  The CPI-M took its massive victory in the 2006 Assembly elections to be a mandate for its policy of industrialisation of West Bengal by evicting thousands of peasant families from their hearths and homes and their farmland and forcibly acquiring fertile multi-crop agricultural land and handing these over to industrialists for setting up industries. For this they invited Indian and foreign monopolists and unrolled the red carpet for them. Inevitably, such a policy was bound to be opposed by (…)

• The Akali Accord

  16 March 2011, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  (On March 4, 2011 former Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh, 81, passed away in New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Besides being an ardent loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family, he was a sturdy secularist and cast in the classic socialist-secular mould of Jawaharlal Nehru. Arjun Singh played a major role behind-the-scenes before the signing of the Rajiv-Longowal accord which, however, was short-lived due to the brutal assassination of the Akali leader. The (…)

• The Tragic History of Muslim Complacency (1949-2010)

  16 March 2011, by Syed Shahabuddin

  UNLAWFUL OCCUPATION OF BABRI MASJID, ITS CONVERSION INTO A MANDIR AND SUBSEQUENT DEMOLITION
  Communal politics, partition and the migration of the Muslim elite from UP to Pakistan had all cast their shadows on Ayodhya around independence and the tiny Muslim community (about five per cent) in that small town, stood demoralised and helpless. It was systemically harassed after independence came.
  Ayodhya had been known for communal harmony and composite culture and as a meeting place of (…)

• Understanding Binayak Sen’s Victimhood

  16 March 2011, by Arup Kumar Sen

  Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Raipur Sessions Court in Chhattisgarh for sedition on December 24, 2010. He was convicted under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005. It should be mentioned here that respected members of the Indian judicial system condemned the judgment. Justice (retired) Rajinder Sachar termed the judgment as “ridiculous and unacceptable”. Reacting to the judgment, senior (…)