Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• The Danger Of Fighting Maoists Without Knowing Who They Are

  16 July 2010, by Diptendra Raychaudhuri

  A recent news report revealed that after its initial reluctance the Army is now raising a 50,000 strong force to fight the Naxal war. Quite expected. The state cannot afford to lose any war it has started to impose its writ on the territory it owns.
  That’s what we are told every now and then. The ‘state’s writ’, ‘democracy,’ ‘development’, and so many arguments are put forward to prove the legitimacy of a war against the Maoists. A civilised society cannot tolerate such dissent, we are (…)

• A Research Project on Gandhi and M.N. Roy

  16 July 2010, by R M Pal

  I wrote the following outline of a comparative study of M. N Roy and Gandhi in 1992, when I retired from Rajdhani College, University of Delhi. I did not intend sitting idle and wanted to do some research on Gandhi and M.N. Roy. I thought I might be able to keep myself engaged in writing on this subject and a friend of mine, who knows my background, suggested that I should be able to get a grant from the ICSSR for doing research on this topic. That’s how I wrote the outline. One day I went (…)

• Developmental State and People’s Struggle for Land Rights

  16 July 2010, by Suranjita Ray

  On May 15, 2010 the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas shells and lathicharged hundreds of villagers staging a dharna on the road at Balitutha in Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa to clear all hurdles against land acquisition and allotment of mines to Posco at the earliest as committed by the government.1 To help the administration acquire land for the steel project—Posco—police mercilessly beat up the villagers injuring more than 100 including many women from Dhinkia and nearby (…)

• Conscience and Charar-e-Sharief

  16 July 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
  One month to date after the destruction of the shrine and mosque at Charar-e-Sharief, a team of journalists reached the township. As one looked round the ghastly devastation of rows of burnt houses with their walls standing as mute witnesses to the crime, spontaneously it came to one’s lips: if you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
  As one slowly climbed the stone slabs at the threshold of the complex, one could almost sense that on those stones have fallen for (…)

• On Sharad Patil’s Rejoinder

  16 July 2010, by Chaturanan Mishra

  COMMUNICATION
  In criticism of my article “Can the Left become the National Alternative (Mainstream, May 8, 2010), Sharad Patil, the General Secretary of the Satyashodhak Communist Party, has in his rejoinder “Can the Left (Communists) become the National Alternative?” (Mainstream, June 5, 2010) written: “All Lohiaites have formed, according to Mishra, casteist parties.” This is totally false. I have not written in my article anything regarding Lohiaites. Hence this is Asatyam Samarthan. (…)

• Climate Change: Socio-Political Implications

  16 July 2010, by Sujit Lahiry

  Climate change is a very complex issue. In recent years, climate change and global warming have become matters of intense heated debate among policy-makers, analysts and acade-micians. At the same time, climate change has become an integral part of the growing literature on environmental discourse. The vagaries of climate change are unfolding in such a manner that it affects the security and well-being of all living beings. How is climate affected? How do we map climate change? What are the (…)

• ’Sri Lankan Model’ is No Model

  16 July 2010, by T J S George

  If it takes a thief to catch a thief, can we say it requires terrorism to defeat terrorism? That is the theory Mahenda Rajapakse put into practice in Sri Lanka. Because he succeeded in crushing Prabhakaran’s LTTE, the “Sri Lankan Model” is now attracting the attention of other governments that face internal insurrections.
  Perhaps the most notable example is the not widely publicised visit Burma’s military dictator Than Shwe paid to Colombo recently. Than Shwe rarely travels outside his (…)

• Is South Block Listening?

  10 July 2010, by SC

  Last month it was written in these columns in Mainstream (June 19): What is most amazing is that at a time when inflation reigns high, the government is thinking of deregulation of the pricing of such intermediaries as petroleum products.
  Now the government has actually gone in for decontrol of petrol prices and this has been predictably hailed by the industry as a whole as a “welcome move”. As the FICCI Secretary-General has observed, People tend to consume more fuel than necessary if (…)

• US Bid To Make Way For Taliban’s Induction In Kabul: Compounding Earlier Follies

  10 July 2010, by Bashir Mohammad

  The strategy devised at the London Conference on Afghanistan last January—“reintegration and reconciliation”—is a veiled scheme to once again hand over Afghanistan to Pakistan through the vehicle of the Taliban (whose acceptability is being sought to be ensured by the use of such an adjective as “moderate” which in reality is hollow, senseless and bereft of any meaning). US President Barack Obama’s rhetoric on the “Way Forward in Af-Pak” has the same thrust.
  The consequences of this (…)

• Kyrgyz Crisis and Regional Security

  10 July 2010, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The Indian discourse on regional security has traditionally paid scant attention to the country’s extended neighbourhood of Central Asia. No discourse on the Afghan problem will be complete without co-relating it with the geopolitics of Central Asia, and yet our strategic thinkers somehow manage without it.
  The crisis in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan no doubt holds out grave impli-cations for regional security and India cannot remain impervious to them. Kyrgyzstan too is a (…)