Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Changing Weather and Shifting Glaciers: Deeper Ecological Concerns

  26 December 2009, by Chandra Mohan Bhandari

  Intellect, will and emotion, the powers of head, chest and heart with whom man as a conscious being has been endowed, will prove his undoing if, caught in the net of his concepts, in the brilliance of his achievements and in the web of his entanglements he forgets his anchorage in the weaving and working of the greater life.
  —Karlfried Graf von Durkheim
  Deeper ecological concerns and possible remedial measures need more than patchwork solutions. The thesis that it would be futile to (…)

• Justice Liberhan Report: Half-Truthful and Half-Untold

  26 December 2009, by Syed Shahabuddin

  Historians will indeed take a poor view of the national leadership in the critical days of 1992: a Prime Minister who was either naïve or incompetent and least interested in performing his constitutional and legal duties; an Opposition leader, who was, to say the least, a hypocrite, who had conceptualised and mobilised the people through his Rath Yatra and incited their fanaticism and then called December 6 the saddest day of his life; a senior colleague of his who was not only a (…)

• The Babri Controversey and Liberhan Report

  26 December 2009, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  Seventeen years after the Babri tragedy occurred, the Liberhan Report seems a bit of an anachronism and almost an unnecessaary irritant. The broad contours of the tragedly are no revelation to the country, the tragedy having been already deeply mourned as a fall from the country’s centuries’ long sanity or acclaimed as a grand assertion of Hindu valour and triumph over the minority abuse and desecration of the Hindu places of worship or sentiments which were subjects of or defeated by Muslim (…)

• On the Liberhan Commission

  26 December 2009, by Mukul Dube

  It has long been held that justice delayed is justice denied. The 16.5 years that the Liberhan Commission took to produce its report on the Babri Masjid demolition must, in that light, be called a travesty of justice. Why might it have taken so much longer than the three months it was allotted when it was appointed by the government of Narasimha Rao?
  One reason that the Commission itself offered was that witnesses delayed making their appearances before it. It is entirely possible (…)

• A Wall Collapses, the World Changes

  26 December 2009, by T J S George

  Our press and patriots made quite a splash to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s tragic death. As it happened, it was also, to significant sections among us, the 25th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. So the controversies will go on, the accusations not blunting the justifications. The violations of the time were as heinous as the loyalties were blind.
  In the hurly-burly of the Indira Gandhi emotions, we barely noticed the 20th anniversary of an event (…)

• Eastern Europe: Impressions of a Journey

  26 December 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall (that took place last month) we reproduce here N.C.’s impressions following his visit to Eastern Europe shortly after that momentous development. These appeared in two parts in the issues of Mainstream dated February 17, 1990 and February 24, 1990. Even after twenty years these impressions remain invaluable for anyone trying to analyse the events of 1989 that changed the face of Europe as well as the world at (…)

• Efforts Towards Fiscal Consolidation: A Critical Review

  26 December 2009, by Anil Kumar Jain

  Introduction
  For a sustainable fiscal policy it is essential that the fiscal consolidation process is not only facilitated but also strengthened by concerted efforts to boost revenue flows to meet the growing expenditure requirements. In empirical literature, two kinds of fiscal consolidation are identified. The first type of fiscal consolidation incorporates adjustments which rely mainly on expenditure reduction through cuts in revenue expenditure and, if possible, also in rates and (…)

• Reflections on the Fall of the Berlin Wall

  26 December 2009, by Jolly M. Kaul

  The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, was a concrete barrier which completely enclosed the city of West Berlin that thus became an enclave deep inside the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although there had been severe restrictions on emigration to the West even before the Wall was erected—since there was a separate and much longer Inner German Border (IGB) separating East Germany from the West—a large number of East Germans, estimated around three-and-a-half million, had been able to cross (…)

• Election Defeat of the Leftist Parties and Its Aftermath

  26 December 2009, by P R Dubhashi

  The decisive defeat of the Communist Parties in the recent parliamentary and Assembly by-elections and local elections was a definite indication that the citadel of the Leftist power firmly entrenched in the soil of West Bengal over the last thirtytwo years is facing an imminent collapse. Already the representatives of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in the West Bengal Cabinet have openly demanded the resignation of the Buddhadeb Government paving the way for fresh elections in order to (…)

• Key to Good Governance: a Perceptive, Responsive and Sensitive Administration

  26 December 2009, by Lakshmidhar Mishra

  It may be appropriate to adopt a dialogical method of inquiry into this otherwise complex and mind-boggling arena of governance. The advantages of such an approach are well known. Questioning leads to analysis; analysis leads to rational and scientific thinking and decisions and such decisions constitute the bedrock of sound planning and effective implementation. The questions relevant in the present context are:
  I. What is governance?
  II. What is good governance? (…)