Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Freedom Flotilla Massacre In International Waters

  10 June 2010, by Arshi Khan

  Israeli attacks on the Freedom Flotilla ships in the morning of May 31 killing over 19 and injuring over 30 peace and humanitarian aid activists in the open seas (international waters, not Israeli zone) are brutal exposition of criminal acts under international law. Israeli helicopters and military ships carried out shooting over the unarmed persons without any warning simply for the reason that the ships were carrying humanitarian aid materials to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza suffering (…)

• Coalition Culture

  10 June 2010, by P R Dubhashi

  An economic textbook talks of the pheno-menon of the ‘importance of the unimportant’. The phenomenon is visible in coalition politics as well when small parties claim and receive importance disproportionate to their numbers in the elected bodies.
  Britain traditionally has been a two-party democracy in which in the election outcome one party gains absolute majority and forms the government. There is no ambiguity or uncertainty. But the May 6 election results brought about a different (…)

• The American Century Is So Over

  10 June 2010, by Dilip Hiro

  [This article appeared in tomdispatch.com from where it is being reproduced with the permission of Tom Engelhardt, the founder and editor of tomdispatch.com, and due acknowledgement.]
  Irrespective of their politics, flawed leaders share a common trait. They generally remain remarkably oblivious to the harm they do to the nation they lead. George W. Bush is a salient recent example, as is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When it comes to foreign policy, we are now witnessing a (…)

• Open Letter to Sonia Gandhi

  10 June 2010, by S G Vombatkere

  Dear Srimati Sonia Gandhi,
  I believe that you are one of the few people in the UPA Government who believes that governance includes looking at people’s problems rather than gunning solely for economic growth. This I understand from several statements made by you, in particular, regarding not allowing the dilution of the RTI Act and regarding getting to the root causes of the Maoist militancy rather than merely increasing the use of police force. It is this belief that prompts me to write (…)

• Can the Left (Communists) become the National Alternative?

  10 June 2010, by Sharad Patil

  I have slightly modified the title of Chaturanan Mishra’s paper in Mainstream (May 8, 2010). There is no traditional Socialist—even Lohiaite—party in India today. All Lohiaites have formed, according to Mishra, casteist parties. No united front with casteist parties, he declares; but as the Congress or its splinters, like the Maratha Sharad Pawer-led NC, are ‘secular’, the CPs may have united front with them in order to prevent the ‘communal’ BJP from coming to power.
  This shows that the (…)

• Happy but Insecure Kashmir

  10 June 2010, by Balraj Puri

  This article was written before the latest wave of unrest in the Kashmir Valley sparked by the plenomena of fake encounters.
  It was a pleasant diversion for the tension-ridden people of the Kashmir Valley when they celebrated the announcement that a Kashmiri boy, Shah Faesal, had topped the list of successful candidates of the Indian Administrative Service. There are already some IAS officers from Kashmir but this was the first time that a Kashmiri candidate had topped the list.
  The (…)

• Rabindranath versus Tagore

  10 June 2010, by Amiya Dev

  Are Rabindranath and Tagore the same phenomenon? It may sound absurd, but it is not always that when we talk of Tagore we are also talking of Rabindranath, and vice versa. Years ago an eminent professor of English from another part of India asked me in confidence: is Tagore really that great? This was a decade after his birth centenary. When I answered him, I wasn’t telling him of Tagore, but Rabindranath. Maybe it was from around that time that a non-Bengali Indian friend of mine, not sworn (…)

• Silence of the Lambs?: Why The RSS Wants To Forget Pracharak Sunil Joshi’s Murder

  10 June 2010, by Subhash Gatade

  It was a murder of an old activist, which the RSS would love to forget. It is a different matter that despite the innumerable ways in which it has tried to banish the memory of the whole incident it has found it very difficult to get away with it. And with the latest exposures in the Ajmer Dargah bomb blast case the whole issue has once again returned to haunt it.
  A former RSS pracharak, who was an accused in the murder of a Congress leader and his son, was shot dead in Dewas town, about (…)

• In Defence of N.D. Pancholi’s Legal Representation of Mohammad Afzal Guru

  10 June 2010

  The following is a press statement issued on May 28, 2010.
  We, the undersigned, are very disturbed by the recent controversy that has been generated in the media on the issue of legal representation of Mohammad Afzal Guru. An NGO, the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, in a letter to the media signed by its office-bearers, Gurusharan Singh, S.A.R. Geelani, Amit Bhattacharyya and Rona Wilson, has claimed that Mr N.D. Pancholi “was never at any point the counsel of Mr Afzal (…)

• Snapshots of Global and Internal Politics on May 23 and May 24, 2010

  10 June 2010, by Rakesh Gupta

  Germans sign the Eurozone package in the context of the Greece bail-out and the German leader visits German soldiers in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton is in China to talk to China about the US’ relations with it. The US renews its agreement with Japan over its military base and fumes against North Korea’s hostile act against South Korea, while Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchange fire at the border near the Poonch area. The Afghans are in conclave with the not-very-insignificant Afghan (…)