Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Love in the times of Fundamentalist Politics: Case of Hadiya

  2 December 2017

  by Ram Puniyani
  The politics of communal polarisation is focusing on many identity issues, one being the Love-Jihad, where a Hindu girl married to a Muslim or Christian man is targeted, and is legally manipulated in a manner to ensure that she is forced to be sent to her parents or to ‘anti-Conversion clinics’. There is some public knowledge about Hadiya and the bogey of Love-Jihad, spiced up with recruitment for participating in Jihad in Syria. Still, the cases of the likes of Swetha, a (…)

• Challenge before Rahul Gandhi

  2 December 2017, by Kuldip Nayar

  Political parties all over the world have come to be closed shops. What is known as the ‘High Command’ usually dictates who will be installed as the President. Rahul Gandhi has been ‘elected’ as the Congress President. The outgoing chief, Sonia Gandhi, saw to it that her son would occupy the top party position.
  I had seen the change in the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom from close quarters when I was India’s High Commissioner at London in the nineties. Mrs Margaret Thatcher was (…)

• Sudden Death of Justice Loya

  2 December 2017

  The following is the letter of the former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral L. Ramdas (Retd.) to the Chief Justice of India.
  Dear Hon Chief Justice of India,
  All democracies exist and survive on three main pillars — namely the Executive, Legislature and the Judiciary. Freedom from British rule was won after a prolonged struggle and the Indian Constitution was evolved after nearly two-and-a-half years of debate in the Constituent Assembly, and passed on November 29, 1949 and India became a (…)

• Journey from Bhopal Disaster to Nuclear Disaster

  2 December 2017

  by Gopal Krishna
  “We may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.” (referring tohumans who act mechanically on instructions) - Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1792
  The 33rd anniversary of the industrial disaster of Bhopal, some six years after the world’s largest-ever industrial disaster, wherein the triple nuclear meltdowns occurred at Fukushima Daiichi and the upcoming movie, Parmanu—The Story of Pokhran by John Abraham creates a compelling logic to take stock of the existing legal regime (…)

• Grim Warning from Bhopal / Mother India beckons us All / By Decree Alone

  2 December 2017, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Grim Warning from Bhopal
  It was a massacre of innocents by all counts. What happened at the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal in the early morning of December 3 was not just a tragedy but a heinous crime which killed nearly two thousand and hospitalised countless others, brings out something much more ghastly than the hazards of modern industrialisation.
  The enormity of the crime—unprecedented in our times—lies not merely in any negligence on the part of the workers (…)

• Danger from Nuclear Reactors

  2 December 2017

  by P.B. Sawant
  The news published with fanfare on May 18, 2017 that the government had decided to install ten indigenous nuclear reactors in four different States to augment energy by 7000 MW followed by the news on June 2, 2017 that two additional Russian reactors would be installed at Kudankulam, had then shocked all the conscientious and knowledgeable people. Now comes the news that the government has decided to go ahead with the building of six French reactors, each with the capacity (…)

• Classy Caste and Prejudice: Being Scientist, Being Khole

  2 December 2017

  by Navneet Sharma and Anamica
  Maharashtra is a land of wonders. Wonder leads to philosophy, it amazes and amuses, simultaneously it bewilders. Maharashtra has been the land of Shahuji Maharaj, Ambedkar, Ramteerth, Ramdas, Namdeo Dhasal, Bhaurao Patil and Dabholkar. Simultaneously, it is the land of Bal Thackeray, Hedgewar, Savarkar, Sambhaji Bhide and Khole. Medha Khole is the newest addition to the list which has taken off the lid from filth which the modern middle class society has been (…)

• India surviving inside the Republic of Lynching

  2 December 2017

  by Arun Srivastava
  In eastern Indian States, especially in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, people have been witness to an old-fashioned rural politics, called the “Bhumihari policy”. Under the policy the head of the family usually chastises the younger members of the family for wrongdoings, particularly insulting and abusing the people from other castes and families. The reprimand makes the complainant satisfied. The matter is settled. The younger members in fact indulge in such activities under (…)

• Adivasi has no reason to Dance

  2 December 2017

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Debatra Dey
  Adwasi will not Dance by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar; Speaking Tiger, New Delhi; 2017; pages 189.
  Sometimes it seems that the border-line between fiction and reality is shrouded in a cloud of confusion. It is hardly possible to make a distinction between fiction and non-fiction when buried truths come up in a collection of short stories of tribal India particularly from the hard soil of poverty-striken Jharkhand. The controversial book, Adivasi will not Dance, (…)

• Russian Revolution and India — V

  2 December 2017

  by Shaukat Usmani
  IN 1919, there was born in Moscow, a unique organisation embracing all the revolutionary socialist elements of the world. This was the historic Communist International.
  There was no Indian present at the First Congress of the Communist International known in abbreviated form as the Comintern. But at the Second Congress of the Comintern, M.N. Roy, who had been brought from Mexico by M. Borodin, represented India and at the recommen-dation of Borodin was invested with (…)