Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Kashmir Crisis

  20 September 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  For long it has been fashionable to talk about the Kashmir crisis as the most intractable challenge before the country and yet do pretty little to deal with it and thereby let the blood-letting go on. Recently, however, one notices some stir in diverse circles both at home and abroad to tackle the Kashmir problem. A feeling appears to have crept in both within the government and in the Opposition that Kashmir can no longer be kept on the back-burner. This sense of urgency has to a large (…)

• Solve Kashmir Problem The Gandhian Way

  20 September 2010, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  The people of Kashmir Valley had, on several momentous occasions, made their intention clear that they prefer to remain Indians. This they did by participating in successive State and federal elections, despite the boycott call by separatists, through State Assembly Resolutions in 1953 and 1956, and through their iconic leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah’s pronouncement in 1975 that “Kashmir’s accession to India was irrevocable”.
  The present chief of the National Conference, Dr Farooq (…)

• Jnaneshwari Express Sabotage and Mass Murder Case

  20 September 2010, by Dipak Kumar Ghosh

  The following article appeared in Bengali in Dainik Statesman and was later rendered into English and sent to us by the author who has taken full respectively for its publication. His first article on the Jnaneshwari Express sabotage and mass murder case appeared in Mainstream (July 10, 2010).
  Umakanta Mahato, the CID-CBI got-up game’s alleged mastermind of the Jnaneswari Express sabotage and mass murder case (May 27, 2010), was compelled to embrace death on August 26, 2010 midnight. The (…)

• Khairlanji Dalit Massacres: Justice for the Victims Aborted

  20 September 2010, by A K Biswas

  Part-I
  “If someone takes someone’s life (deliberately and not accidentally) then he forfeits the right to his life”.
  —John Stuart Mill
  The judgment delivered by a Division Bench in quadruple murders of members of the Bhotmange family, village Khairlanji, district Bhandara in Maharashtra left everyone with a sensitive mind shocked and dismayed. Surekha Bhotmange and her 18-year-old daughter and two sons, including one who was disabled, were brutally murdered by an upper-caste mob on (…)

• Comprehensive Analysis of Applied Linguistics in Complex Multilingual Societies

  20 September 2010, by Madhulika Sharma

  BOOK REVIEW
  Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local by A.K. Mohanty, M. Panda, R. Phillipson and T. Skutnabb-Kangas (eds.); Orient Blackswan Private Limited, New Delhi; 2009; pages 400.
  One of the aspects of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the preservation of linguistic heritage. Linguistic globalisation, which has given English a predominant position, can lead to the extinction of many indigenous languages. To preserve the (…)

• Call for Dialogue—the Only Way to Tackle Maoism

  20 September 2010

  by Swadha
  In a bid to give a sharp edge to the anti-Naxal operations in the four worst affected States of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Orissa, the Union Government has recently decided to set up a powerful Unified Command headed by the respective Chief Secretaries to fight the Maoist menace. The government has been unusually proactive in grappling with the surge in the violence unleashed by the Maoists. It is clearly ruffled as is evident from the urgency and seriousness being (…)

• Fake Encounters in Jharkhand

  20 September 2010, by Gladson Dungdung

  In the afternoon on July 5, 2010, the security forces, comprising the JAP and SAF under the leadership of E.H. Siddique, the officer-in-charge of Tamar Police Station, arrived in Gunti village and picked up 45-year-old Etwa Munda of Papirdah village (which comes under Tamar Police Station of Ranchi district in Jharkhand), when he was in the house of his relative Manav Munda. The police also caught a girl, Bengi Kumari, and escorted both of them towards Jabla pahari (forest). After sometime, (…)

• Back to the Basics?

  17 September 2010, by SC

  The PM’s 90-minute interaction with a select group of editors in New Delhi on September 6 was intended to convey to the media and the public at large that the UPA-II dispensation headed by Dr Manmohan Singh was not gripped by a sense of drift as is the dominant impression today. There is no gainsaying that this impression has been strengthened by the head of government’s lacklustre performance in Parliament’s monsoon session if one excludes his impassioned speech during discussion on the (…)

• Nine Years On: India’s Strategic Hot Potato

  17 September 2010, by S G Vombatkere

  September 11, 2001. The world stood aghast at the real-time TV screening of the audacious, coordinated attack on the WTC and Pentagon and trembled when, weeks later, the USA invaded Afghanistan in retaliation to what was under-stood as an Al-Qaeda attack under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. This was first seen as a knee-jerk reaction to retrieve American pride and prop up the USA’s international image, but soon enough the world interpreted it as a strategic move to gain a secure foothold (…)

• Aping the Adversary

  17 September 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  It is surprising how intelligent people in politics sometimes take up positions which should logically belong to their adversaries.
  The Muslim League in 1940 picked up the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ which a bunch of extremist intellectuals had first coined to back up their demand for Pakistan. Other parties in India rejected it. The Congress made it clear that it did not accept the theory itself though it agreed to the partitioning of the country on the basis of the very same (…)