Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• An Open Letter to Sasi Tharoor, my Representative in Parliament

  25 October 2009, by N A Karim

  Dear Mr Sasi Tharoor,
  I am a voter of the Thiruvananthapuram parliamentary constituency from which you were returned to the Lok Sabha in the last elections. With the political glamour of a recent Malayalee contestant to the world’s greatest prestigious executive post, Secretary-General of the United Nations Organisation, you won the parliamentary elections with a wide margin of votes over your rivals. As expected, you were made the Minister of State for External Affairs in the Dr Manmohan (…)

• Why India’s Diplomacy is in Disarray

  25 October 2009, by M K Bhadrakumar

  India has a substantial policy crisis on its hands with the US indicating that the Taliban did not pose a direct threat to its interests,
  The United States couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to reveal its mind on the Taliban than on October 8 evening even as the details were filtering in regarding the car bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. Worse still, the Taliban lost no time claiming responsibility for the attack, which claimed 17 lives.
  A senior US official in (…)

• Letter From Kolkata: Dissecting Vedic Village Scandal

  25 October 2009, by Amitava Mukherjee

  Some of the corporate houses of the country have now reasons to feel despondent. Contrary to public perception, even after Singur and Nandigram they had not lost faith in the West Bengal Government’s ability to acquire agricultural lands of poor farmers for setting up projects which are likely to fatten the money bags of those industrial barons and their middlemen. Recently this came out into the open after a sordid drama was unmasked in what is now being called in West Bengal the Vedic (…)

• Sri Lanka: Five Months After

  25 October 2009, by Apratim Mukarji

  Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa must be a rare civilian leader who has given birth to a new military concept by winning the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Defence academies and experts have been studying what has come to be known as the “Rajapaksa model”.
  The unexpected and complete demolition of the LTTE—long considered the most feared terrorist organisation in the world which had successfully withstood the might of the Sri Lankan state for nearly three (…)

• Behind Sri Lankan Bloodbath

  25 October 2009, by Brahma Chellaney

  Colombo’s victory over the Tamils shows India’s power is on the wane.
  Thousands of non-combatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final phase of the Sri Lankan war this year as government forces overran the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Nearly five months after Colombo’s stunning military triumph, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out—in the name of “eternal vigilance”—to expand by 50 per cent an already-large military. Little (…)

• Fanatic Dalits, Empowered Dalits?

  25 October 2009, by Subhash Gatade

  BOOK REVIEW
  Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation by Badri Narayan; 2009; Sage; pages 195.
  The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring (…)

• Tottering Britain and Partition

  25 October 2009, by P.K. Nigam

  To understand the correct history of India’s independence and partition, it is necessary to know Britain’s economic position after WW II. Churchill had said: “We are not fighting this war (and spending money) to lose our Empire.” Till the war end British politicians did not understand that though the empire was necessary for the British, they had no power left to rule it. Colonial Secretary Cranebourne (the grandson of Lord Salisbury) believed in 1942 that the “British Empire is not dead, it (…)

• Remembering Balagopal: A Feminist Pays Her Tribute To A Comrade

  25 October 2009, by Nandita Haksar

  TRIBUTE
  My first introduction to Balagopal was as a brilliant mathematician with a doctorate from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a lecturer at the Kakatiya University in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. Balagopal had to leave his job at the Kakatiya University because there was a danger that he would be killed by the police because he had been taking up the cause of the Naxalites.
  I could not help smile when I remembered our first meeting as lawyer and client and he had looked at the (…)

• K. Balagopal: A Memory to be Cherished

  25 October 2009, by V. Geetha

  TRIBUTE
  At first it seemed a huge, obscene lie, the news of his death. It did not seem possible—he had been busy as always the weekend before, at a human rights convention in Ananthapur, to mark 10 years of the Human Rights Forum, the organisation he and others started in 1998. That had become a pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts in the weekends, to enquire into rights violations—land grabbing by the state or private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous open (…)

• Edward Moore Kennedy—Defender of a Dream

  25 October 2009, by Sheel Bhadra Kumar

  TRIBUTE
  Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the legendary political patriarch of the most influential family of American politics and a man who knew huge privilege and terrible tragedy in near equal measure in his life, passed away on August 25, 2009 at his home in Hyannis post Massachusetts at the age of 77.
  His death signals the end of an era that held sway from the early 1960s. He was the youngest surviving brother of the four Kennedys. Edward Kennedy lived in the shadow of his (…)