Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Reflections on Nehru

  16 November 2010, by Sajjad Zaheer

  I loved and respected him, worked with him and even followed him in many ways, and yet I was among his severest critics, and perhaps no one was a greater disappointment to me and to my group than Jawaharlal Nehru.
  Our two families were known to each other, from Lucknow and Allahabad, so it was not difficult for me when I came back from England in 1935, an Oxonian and a barrister-at-law, to be taken under the protective wing of Nehru. He knew, of course, that I was a red-hot Communist, but (…)

• Nehru and Indian Socialism

  16 November 2010, by Arjun Sengupta

  Jawaharlal Nehru was not the only aristocrat who entered politics and joined the struggle for independence in India. There were also others who came from similar background of secure family roots, extravagance and style, and who courted imprisonment, flirted with hardship and enjoyed the luxury of sacrifice.
  If Nehru was a romantic, a politician who was more a poet than a schemer, a revolutionary who loved to philosophise more than to operate, he was not the only one of that kind in (…)

• Nehru Legacy for Socialism

  16 November 2010

  by Puran Chandra Joshi
  Dr Arjun Sengupta’s article on ‘Nehru and Indian Socialism’ is full of new insights and understanding which deserve wide discussion among socialists in India.
  Dr Sengupta has made an important methodo-logical departure. He suggests that to judge Nehru’s contribution to socialism from the yardstick of “scientific socialism” would be a mistake. Indeed, this doctrinaire approach has for long been a source of great confusion and error. Nehru was significant not as a (…)

• An Open Letter to Sonia Gandhi

  16 November 2010, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Dear Madam Gandhi,
  It did not behove you to rubbish the Bihar Government in your election campaign there by flying in the face of facts. While to play up your party and play down others is both permissible and the done thing in election campaigns, a responsible leader of a responsible national party should not engage in Orwellian untruths and bad-mouth the government it wishes to replace.
  The last five years out of the 20 that you have branded as the time of misgovernance in Bihar (…)

• Obama: A President Under Siege

  16 November 2010, by Anil Rajimwale

  Some people compare Obama’s presidentship to President Roosevelt’s in the early 20th century, not Franklin Roosevelt of the Second World War fame, but Theodore before the First World War. But there are serious differences: during Roosevelt’s time finance monopoly in the US had begun to split off from the industrial monopoly capitalism. During Bush’s and Obama’s time, the financial empire has become too distanced from its industrial source, too domineering, necessitating calls for restoring (…)

• Dimensions of Mumbai’s Adarsh Scandal

  10 November 2010, by SC

  After the CWG scam the enormity of Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society scandal has struck a body blow to the principal ruling party at the Centre as it is running a coalition government headed by its apointee in Maharashtra and several of its bigwigs, including the CM, are found to be involved in it. But more than the politicians whose image in the public eye has fallen over the years, the fact that besides those associated with politics and the bureaucracy the names of several high-ranking (…)

• Arundhati Roy’s Errors and Interlocutors’ Bloomers

  10 November 2010, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  COMMUNICATION
  Arundhati Roy and myself were on the same wavelength in stressing that the government’s policy of allowing factories in fertile farmlands and giving mining leases in forestlands was responsible for alienating the adivasis and farmers, thereby breeding the Maoists. I, too, condemn the fake encounters staged by Army- men and the vandalism by paramilitary forces in Kashmir and demand that both the Union and the State governments seek the people’s forgiveness for whatever heinous (…)

• Obama Visit: A Left Viewpoint

  10 November 2010

  The following is a Background Note prepared on behalf of the CPI-ML (Liberation) for protests it is planning to hold during US President Barack Obama’s visit to India in cooperation with other likeminded organisations. Written by Arindam Sengupta, a leader of the party, it is captioned “US Hands Off India, Hands Off Asia”. It has been published in the CPI-ML (Liberation) weekly news magazine ML Update (October 29-November 1, 2010) from where it is being reproduced with due acknowledgement. (…)

• Uncle Sam, Energy and Peace in Asia

  10 November 2010, by M K Bhadrakumar

  In the Orient, offsprings don’t rebuke parents, even if the latter are at fault—especially in the post-Soviet space where Marxian formalism continues to prevail as political culture. The sort of stern public rebuke bordering on short shrift that Ashgabat administered to Moscow is extraordinary.
  But then, Moscow tested Turkmen patience by trying to create confusion about Ashgabat’s policy of positive “neutrality”—building energy bridges to the West alongside its thriving cooperation with (…)

• Obama & Co are Planning to Run Away from Afghanistan

  10 November 2010, by H K Dua

  With Afghanistan facing a lot of uncertainty in the foreseeable future, it is imperative for India to begin thinking of how it should meet the contin-gencies arising in its immediate neighbourhood.
  Latest reports from Kabul tend to suggest that President Hamid Karzai’s government has in a way begun talking to a section of the Taliban. Although these talks are at a preliminary level, the idea is to promote “reconciliation” to facilitate the induction of what in President Barak Obama’s (…)