Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Green is the Colour of Indo-US Ties

  18 September 2017

  by Shreya Upadhyay
  The Indo-US strategic partnership is broad-based and has found resonance in shared values, democratic principles as well as geopolitical interests. Both the countries over the years have taken innovative steps and exceptional foreign policy measures to gain optimal and mutual benefits in the fast changing global order. Signing of the historic civil nuclear cooperation agreement, multiple defence deals, the defence technology handshake, regular maritime exercises and (…)

• Bankruptcy Writ Large

  18 September 2017, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Even if the Finance Minister’s wishes were horses, there is no escape from the economic blizzard that India is about to encounter. Without claiming to be a pundit one can without much difficulty discern from Venkataraman’s Budget oration that our economy is today in doldrums. Leaving aside the inescapable impact of the alarming rise in oil prices, the mismanagement of the economy itself is bound to create serious difficulties.
  Six months of the new government has (…)

• On the Rise of Bonapartist-fascism in India

  18 September 2017

  by Murzban Jal
  The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—here the content (…)

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  BRICS Summit, India-China, Rohingya Issue

  9 September 2017, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  From all available information, the Ninth BRICS Summit at Xiamen in southeastern China has been a success from the Indian standpoint. Not only were the substantive talks between China’s President Xi Jinping and PM Narendra Modi most constructive in terms of maintaining peace along the Sino-Indian border but the discussions within the BRICS forum also yielded a productive outcome. China and India alongwith the other three countries—Brazil, Russia and South Africa—that comprise the (…)

• Gauri Lankesh’s Assassination

  9 September 2017

  COMMENTARY
  “Ms Lankesh was like my mother. She once told me that if you are being attacked then you know that you are on the right track... powerfull people are being killed just to send across a message to others. Her death is a personal loss to me.”
  That was how former JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar paid his homage to Gauri Lankesh, the fearless and outspokenly frank activist-journalist who was gunned down by unidentified assailants around 8 pm outside her residence in West Bengaluru (…)

• The Union Cabinet Reshuffle

  9 September 2017, by Barun Das Gupta

  Prime Minister Modi has reshuffled his Cabinet putting an end to endless media speculation about who will be ‘in’ and who will be ‘out’. In the event, some Ministers who were found to be lacking in their performance have been shunted out, ostensibly to strengthen the party in the run-up to the general elections in 2019. What beats understanding is how a person who has failed to perform as a Minister is expected to do better as a party organiser. The induction of several former IFS, IAS and (…)

• Reassessing Demonetisation: ‘RBI says 99 per cent is back’

  9 September 2017

  According to the RBI, 99 per cent of the demonetised currency has come back to the banks. What, in your opinion, is the significance of this statement?
  What the RBI has announced now was known to it as early as on January 13, 2017. Our article in Economic and Political Weekly has shown that by that date 98.8 per cent of the demonetised notes had come back to the RBI. What has now been announced is only a confirmation of that. So the question arises: why did the RBI not reveal this fact (…)

• Trump, May and Fate of EU

  9 September 2017

  by Anshuman Gupta, Vipul Sharma
  Europe is, in a great measure, saved as a result of Donald Trump and his unviable and contradictory initiatives. The ultra-Right wave was on the rise with many far-Right parties gaining prominence in Europe, riding on the back of the downturn journey of the world economy and their appeal to the left-out natives, who could not capitalise on the liberal policies of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. Donald Trump also secured the White House (…)

• Talaaq Talaaq Talaaq

  9 September 2017, by Kuldip Nayar

  The Supreme Court’s judgment is harsh and unequivocal. There could be no compromise on the basics of the Indian Constitution, freedom to women and men to lead their lives as they wanted. I wish the Muslim community had accepted the bar on triple talaaq, which goes against the spirit of the Constitution. But it looks as if the fundamentalists have been having their way.
  This was even the case with Shah Bano, a Muslim woman, where the Supreme Court intervened and fixed alimony in 1985 after (…)

• Supreme Court Verdict on Instant Triple Talaaq — What does it mean for the BJP?

  9 September 2017

  by Vahidha Nizam
  The Supreme Court on August 22, 2017 gave a verdict banning instant triple talaaq. It indeed is a historic judgement in the context that it upholds equality to all irrespective of religion, caste, creed and gender as enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution. By a 3-to-2 vote, a Supreme Court panel declared unlawful the practice in Islam that had allowed husbands to divorce their wives instantly by uttering the word talaaq (divorce) continuously in one go. In an order (…)