Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Lead, kindly Light....

  8 February 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Every year we dutifully go through the ritual of offering homage to Gandhiji on the day of his martyrdom.
  We shall once again be witnessing the ceremony on January 30 to be conducted as per protocol—early morning prayer at Rajghat, singing of bhajans and hymns, a round of spinning and then during the course of the day, meetings and seminars and a special programme on Doordarshan to remind us of the Father of the Nation. VVIPs encircled by gun-totting security guards will do the round (…)

• Towards Violent Uprising?

  8 February 2010

  COMMUNICATION
  What is new about the presence of a few policemen at the new year party toasted by an NCP politician, allegedly for and on behalf of an underworld don? The fact that many politicians, and quite a few men in khaki, have always had nexus with the gangsters is known to everyone. It has always been a symbiotic existence. Have elections not been financed by the underworld? Not much harm will be done to the erring policemen, because they will be shielded by their guardians, and (…)

• Tiibute to Jyoti Basu

  8 February 2010

  TRIBUTE
  Jyoti Basu is no more. After 17 days of valiant struggle (that first began when he was hospitalised on New Year’s Day having been struck by a bout of pneumonia) he finally succumbed to multi-organ failure and breathed his last at 11.47 am on January 17, 2010. On July 8 last year the former West Bengal CM—the longest-serving head of any State Government in independent India—had completed 95 years in age.
  More than 28 years ago when one of Jyoti Basu’s closest (…)

• In Rammanohar Lohia’s Birth Centenary Year - Removing the Cobwebs

  8 February 2010, by Surendra Mohan

  Among the radical and progressive sections which have carried or inherited the legacy of the Nehruvian consensus, the name of Dr Rammanohar Lohia is synonymous with an anti-Nehru and anti-Indira Gandhi obsessed mindset. This personal angle is then transferred to the ideological plane and these sections associate Lohia with the opposites of the elements of that consensus.
  This entire understanding is, however, deeply flawed and contrary to facts. Its dismisses, as if with a wave of (…)

• PM Should Rethink

  8 February 2010, by Chaturanan Mishra

  On the foundation day of the Indian National Congress the Prime Minister said that terrorism, communalism, Naxalism and regionalism were the major challenges before the nation. He forgot that the corrupt and anti-people administration is the main cause behind those challenges. After the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001 the USA took measures and that is why no second attack became possible. India, on the contrary, has had to face repeated terror attacks. (…)

• Issue of Organisation of States in India

  8 February 2010, by P R Dubhashi

  The December 9, 2009 midnight announcement by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram that the constitutional process will start for the creation of the new State of Telangana literally stirred a hornets’ nest in Andhra Pradesh, while it opened up a Pandora’s box in the rest of the country. While the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, Chandrashekhar Rao, broke his fast leading to the restoration of calm in the Telangana region, it evoked an immediate virulent reaction in the Andhra region (…)

• GMO Crops: A Few Questians to the Genetic Engineering

  8 February 2010, by Sailendra Nath Ghosh

  In April last year, the Supreme Court, in response to a public interest litigation filed by the Gene Campaign (whose convenor is the internationally known geneticist Dr Suman Sahai), directed the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) to consider the toxicity and allergenicity of GM crops and to post the relevant material on the web so that independent experts could examine these. The Supreme Court asked the GEAC to study also the isolation distance of experimental fields to prevent (…)

• In the Land of Gandhi....

  8 February 2010, by Preeti Chauhan

  (This article was sent on January 4, 2010. We are publishing it in view of the validity of its essential contents. —Editor)
  Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian working amongst the adivasis of Dantewada is sitting on an indefinite fast since December 26, 2009. He had planned a padayatra beginning December 14, 2009, followed by a satyagraha, finally culminating in a jan sunwai (public hearing). He was denied permission to do the padayatra and hold satyagraha in Dantewada for the SP of Dantewada felt (…)

• Jawaharlal Nehru’s Development Vision Has Been Widely Misunderstood

  8 February 2010, by Bharat Dogra

  In the debate on development paradigm Jawaharlal Nehru is frequently presented predominantly as a strong advocate of heavy industry, large dams and big machines - someone who placed big hopes in modern technology. However, a more careful reading of several of his writings presents a different picture of a thoughtful mind troubled by several aspects of modern technology and industrial society, a mind which was prepared to go back hundreds of years in search of more inspiration and insight. (…)

• ’Let Us Not Make Truth A Casualty In This War’

  8 February 2010

  Azad exposes Chidambaram’s Clear-and-Hold operations based on the Stratetgic Hamlet programme pursued by Britain in Malaya and the USA in Vietnam
  The following interview of Comrade Azad, spokesperson of the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee, given to the Maoist Information Bulletin on October 19, 2009 reached our office in late December last year. This wideranging interview