Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Mumbai Festival: Looking for that Golden Age

  2 July 2009, by Ashoke Chatterjee

  [gris]This article reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. —Editorgris]
  Satyug is an extraordinary theme for a Mumbai Festival held after 26/11—extraordinarily visionary or extraordinarily foolhardy. Or both. Either way, the theme is typical of all Bombay Dreams, with their promises so much larger than their risks. Dreams brought my forebears in the early 1900s to Bombay, the name by which they loved this great city. No fear then of the (…)

• Lalgarh and Beyond: Disaster in the Making

  22 June 2009, by SC

  The government’s strategy to deal with the internal security problem has caused legitimate concern in civil society.

  For sometime now violence has erupted in the Lalgarh-Jangalmahal area of West Bengal’s West Midnapore district bordering on (...)

• After Congress‘ Rejuvenation in Election 2009: Need for an Indigenous New Deal

  22 June 2009, by Praful Bidwai

  The great story of Election-2009 is the Congress’ rejuvenation on an inclusive pluralist-secular platform and the electorate’s emphatic rejection of the BJP’s divisive, communal politics. The Congress has got its second wind and overtaken the BJP by 90 seats and a hefty 10 percentage points in votes. There is overwhelming evidence that the key to its performance lay in its projecting itself as an advocate of the caring state on a broadly Left-of-Centre or social democratic platform through (…)

• Habib Saheb and the Gonds‘ Story of Creation

  22 June 2009, by Sohail Hashmi

  TRIBUTE
  Habib Tanvir, 86, one of the country‘s greatest dramatists, passed away in Bhopal on June 8, 2009. He was instrumental in creating a new language in theatre blending contemporary drama with folk performance and raising folk forms to a level that could attract international attention.
  Born Habib Ahmed Khan in Raipur on September 1, 1923, he wrote poems at an early age under the name ‘Tanvir’, a word that never left him. Among his seminal works were Agra Bazar, Charandas Chor, (…)

• West Bengal: Khejury — The Truth

  22 June 2009, by D. Bandyopadhyay

  Genocide is not an appropriate word. In international lexicon it has a definition which would not perhaps apply to large scale slaughter, mayhem, arson, organised rape and other atrocities committed by the ruling party against their political opponents. If you look at the history of the Left Front Government from 1977 onwards, there have been cases of large scale manslaughter beginning with firing on the refugees who settled in the island of Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans in 1978-79. It is (…)

• Whither BJP?

  22 June 2009, by Amitava Mukherjee

  If the various reviews of the results of the just concluded Lok Sabha election are taken into account, then one cannot but conclude that the BJP has more sympathisers among the ‘pundits’ than what the Congress can count on. Lots of reasons for the BJP’s defeat and likely outcomes of it are being proffered—personal attacks against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Varun Gandhi’s vitriolic diatribe against the minority community, internal squabbles and so on. Pro-BJP scribes and commentators are (…)

• Women‘s Groups Condemn State Cover-up in Shopian Case

  22 June 2009

  The news of the rape and murder of two young women in Shopian in Kashmir is deeply shocking. We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms.
  We are also deeply disturbed by the reaction of the State. Instead of speaking out against this flagrant violation of human rights, and particularly the right of women to live safely and with dignity, instead of taking speedy and firm steps to bring the perpetrators to book, the State and the new administration first denied the rape of (…)

• Shopian Killings Don’t Stir Us!

  22 June 2009, by Humra Quraishi

  Ironies hit. On one hand you have women on top slots. President Pratibha Patil, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Women and Child Welfare Minister Krishna Tirath…the list is long. But just about pause here. And see what can happen to the ordinary woman of this land. She could be raped, murdered, tossed and flung about, and yet unaffected we’d sit.
  No, we are not crying hoarse even as details are trickling in that the two Kashmiri women of Shopian were indeed (…)

• From Employment Guarantee to National Food Security

  22 June 2009, by Sitaram Kumbhar

  The President of India Pratibha Patel, in her first address to the joint session of Parliament after 15th Lok Sabha election, said that the UPA Government would pass a legislation called the “National Food Security Act” (NFSA) which would entitle, by law, to every family below the the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas to 25 kg of rice or wheat a month at Rs 3 a kg. This is something historic. The NFSA will guarantee that cheap foodgrain is made available to those who can claim it. (…)

• Remembering E.M.S. Namboodiripad on his Birth Centenary

  22 June 2009, by SC

  More than eleven years have passed since E.M.S. Namboodiripad breathed his last in Thiruvananthapuram on March 19, 1998. Yet it seems as if it was only the other day that one walked into his room in the party office in the Capital for a refreshing conversation as one used to have with him and two of his party colleagues occupying leading positions in the CPI-M as Polit-Bureau members, B.T. Ranadive and M. Basavapunnaiah. They were the three stalwarts of the Indian communist movement, all of (…)