Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Response to D. Bandyopadhyay

  30 October 2010, by Sumanta Banerjee

  COMMUNICATION
  Since from among those whom I addressed my open letter (in Mainstream of September 11), only D. Bandyopadhyay has come up with a rejoinder (in the October 9 issue), I feel obliged to respond to his observations with a few words.
  One, he need not have wasted four long paragraphs on trying to convince me of the diabolical character of the CPI-M in West Bengal —since I had already in my letter denounced that party for its “fascist atrocities and crass corruption”, describing (…)

• Maoism: A Variety of Anarchism

  30 October 2010, by Anil Rajimwale

  Maoism and Naxalism are nothing but a modern variety of anarchism, which was demolished long ago by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Anybody familiar with their criticism of theories and practice of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lassalle, Proudhon, Narodniks and other anarchists will in no way be impressed with Maoism in India today.
  Marx’s Fights against Anarchist Ultra-revolutionism
  IT was in the 19th century that anarchism merged as a petty-bourgeois ultra-‘revolutionary’ trend in the working class (…)

• Ensuring Right to Education in the Red Corridor

  30 October 2010, by Gladson Dungdung

  The Indian Government and media are repeatedly telling us that 92,000 square kilometres of geographical area covering 170 districts in nine States of India are out of control of the Indian state. The vicinity is full of natural resources including varieties of minerals, forests and water sources. The territory is ruled by the Maoists; therefore the government has branded it as the ‘Red Corridor’. Actually, the area is highly adivasi dominated, therefore it is supposed to be called the (…)

• Is Naxalism a Problem or a Voice for Social Justice?

  30 October 2010

  by Pravesh Kumar
  Naxalism has been branded as a serious problem for national security by various intellectuals and the media. The Planning Commission of India has also highlighted this as a serious problem with regard to India’s national security, growth and development. On the other hand, there is another section of society who thinks Naxalism is a social movement against the rampant social exclusions of the have nots. It is the fight of the poor, discriminated and the marginalised Indian (…)

• Day One in Calcutta

  30 October 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS The following report by Nikhil Chakravartty, the Calcutta correspondent of People’s Age (published from Bombay), appeared in the weekly’s August 24, 1947 issue (it was wired from Calcutta on August 17, 1947) under the following headlines : ‘End of a Nightmare and Birth of New Dawn!’; ‘Calcutta Transformed by Spirit Of Independence’; ‘Hindus, Muslims Hug Each Other In Wild Joy—Tears Roll Down Where Blood Once Soaked The Streets’. We are reproducing it on the occasion of (…)

• A National Loss

  30 October 2010, by S Viswam

  Tempus fugit. Time flies. And how! I was completely taken aback on being reminded by Sumit that the tenth death anniversary of Nikhilda will fall on June 27. “No, it cannot be,” I protested. “Not ten years already.” “Yes, yes,”said Sumit, “it is, it is.”
  It is unbelievable that ten years have passed since we lost Nikhilda. Yet, in its rapid sweep, Time has devoured those years and completely overshadowed an event which when it occurred deeply saddened a number of people whose lives had (…)

• An Undeceived Leftist

  30 October 2010

  by N.S. Jagannathan
  My acquaintance with Nikhil Chakravartty began in the mid-sixties when I was working with The Hindustan Times. Mainstream had just been launched and my Leftist friends had introduced me to the journal and, a little later, to Nikhil himself. He had not yet become the father figure he had since, and even though I was much younger to him, pride would not let me address him as ‘Nikhilda’ as others had even then started to do. He was still a distant figure to me, though (…)

• The Power of One

  30 October 2010, by T J S George

  From the end of the 1950s, Delhi became India’s densest journalistic jungle. The transplantation there of a wholly Bombay phenomenon like Frank Moraes was a pointer to the inexorability of the process. No one will understand the economics of newspaper proliferation in Delhi. What is clear to all is that by the end of the Nehru era, the Capital of India had more journalists per square inch than any other city in the country.
  Among them were stars. Inevitably, some twinkled by pretension. (…)

• Commanding Moral Presence

  30 October 2010

  by Hiranmay Karlekar
  It is only with time that the magnitude of the void created by Nikhil Chakravartty’s passing becomes clear to some of us. Initially, we took the news with resignation; sorrow was tempered by the realisation that he was terminally ill and it was a matter of time. Gradually, however, the implications of the loss to India’s factured media of perhaps its most commanding moral presence begin to gnaw. Whose sober counsel, whose voice of wisdom stemming from a non-negotiable (…)

• Terror Cauldron in Response to Policy Failures

  30 October 2010, by Rakesh Gupta

  The drone attacks on the Afghan-Pak border killing civilians and terror alert in Europe fairly strongly link up with terror attacks by Mend in Nigeria, raising of the terror threat alert from red to scarlet in France and the stone-pelting youths and their consequent deaths in the Kashmir Valley inviting the all-party farcical visit to Srinagar. All these may have to deal with foreign policy and domestic policy. The level of violence is much deeper than the unprece-dented violence shown in (…)