Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• There is More to it than Meets the Eye to India’s Boycott of the Recently Concluded OBOR Summit

  10 June 2017

  by Aurobindo Ghose
  This article was sent on May 25 but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
  It is ten days since the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Summit, called and hosted by China at Beijing from May 14 to 15, 2017, concluded. Significantly, India did not participate in OBOR. But the subject is so important for peace, development and stability or otherwise in the region and beyond that it has continued relevance and requires a fresh review and discussion. Yesterday’s front (…)

• Sovereignty and Security: Questioning the wisdom of privatising PSU-s

  10 June 2017, by S G Vombatkere

  The Government of India (GoI) has decided to go ahead with “strategic sale” to a “strategic partner”, of 26 per cent of its present 54 per cent share in the Bharat Earthmovers Ltd (BEML), which produces critical hardware for India’s Armed Forces (military, for short). Disinvestment of GoI shares in public assets orginated in Congress times, but disinvestment of a defence-sector PSU is a “first” which the BJP-led NDA-2 Government can claim. The strategy behind the sale is questionable, (…)

• Remembering Mazhar Ali Khan On His Birth Centenary

  10 June 2017

  Mazhhar Ali Khan Ali Khan, a legendary journalist who never flinched from uncompromising journalism, upholding the sanctity of the freedom of press, was born on June 6, 1917. He married Tahira Hyat Khan, daughter of Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, Prime Minister of Punjab, in colonial India. Sir Sikandar was the younger son of Nawab Muhammad Hyat Khan of Wah. The Hyat family belonged to the Khattar tribe of Attock, North Punjab. Educated at school in Aligarh under the then Aligarh Muslim University, (…)

• Glorious Dust (Editorial, Pakistan Times, January 31, 1948)

  10 June 2017

  Mahatma Gandhi is dead. The world has been deprived of the sight and sound of his frail body and aged voice—the body and voice that had in the last few months almost lost, for a large section of mankind, their personal and emphemeral character and become timeless symbols of compassionate love and fearless rectitude. As the man who first ploughed the arid wastes of Indian politics in the pre-nationalist period, the man who husbanded the seeds and saplings, only recently come to fruit and (…)

• On Fiftieth Anniversary of the Naxalbari Uprising: Memory of a Meeting with Charu Mazumdar

  10 June 2017, by Barun Das Gupta

  As the fiftieth anniversary of the Naxalite movement is being observed, old memories come crowding in my mind. One unforgettable memory is that of meeting Charu Mazumdar, the leader of the Naxalite movement, at his home at Siliguri in north Bengal. It was November 1968. I was working with the Bengali newsweekly Compass, started by the eminent communist revolutionary of undivided Bengal, Pannalal Das Gupta. North Bengal had then been struck by a devastating flood. I was sent to cover the (…)

• On Fiftieth Anniversary of the Naxalbari Uprising: Wages of Conceit and Eulogy

  10 June 2017, by Sankar Ray

  Looking back at the ‘spring thunder’—the ecstatic definition of the historic Naxalbari struggle by the Radio Peking in mid-1967—after 50 years from many angles is a reflex of historical consciousness. There’s no denying that the battle had for the first time focused on the imperative for agrarian rights for the landless labour. Dozens of essays, published in English and other languages, mostly are in dearth of the angle of detachment, a must for any historio-graphic exercise. Among them the (…)

• On Fiftieth Anniversary of the Naxalbari Uprising: Looking Back

  10 June 2017, by SC

  The following piece appeared in this journal on July 18, 1992 to mark twentyfive years of the Naxalbari movement. On the fiftieth anniversary of the same struggle it is being reproduced for the benefit of our readers. The author, then the Associate Editor of Mainstream, now edits this weekly.
  Twentyfive years ago, in the first half of 1967, was born a spark which, in the words of Beijing Radio quoting Mao, promised to set the prairie on fire. History will pronounce its final verdict on the (…)

• The Red Day

  10 June 2017

  Yours is the face I saw in a procession.
  All day
  I searched for you
  and then at dusk I found you
  sitting in my home
  resplendent
  beside the lamp.
  Refusing me all day
  you held me close at night.
  In that terrible heat
  I found no shade anywhere;
  the blue seas had all dried up
  I rub my eyes.
  Did I see you in my dreams?
  Or are you mere illusion?
  Hold me close in your arms
  let the frozen tears
  of my heart
  melt.
  Give my love a place to be born
  while I
  tie the (…)

• Anatomy of the ISI: Providing Insights into its Valuable Pitfalls, Failures and Success Stories

  10 June 2017

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Ahmad Zaboor
  Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan by Hein G. Kiesling; Harpercollins India; 2016; pages: 307.
  Writing about the intelligence agency is the most uphill task given their secretive protocols and apprehensions of infiltration jeopardising their working. But Hein G. Kiesling has taken up the most daunting job of writing about the Pakistan intelligence agency—better known as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI was established in 1948 and is (…)

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  Exploring the “Achievements” of Modi Rule

  8 June 2017, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  The Narendra Modi-led BJP Government at the Centre has completed three years and the party leaders are busy projecting their dispensation’s “achievements” in these three years.
  The real “achievement”, of course, is in the sphere of social relations. A deliberate endeavour has been made for the last three years to turn our secular, pluralist country into a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. Remember, how Mohammad Aklaque and Pehlu Khan had to lay down their lives before savage attacks (…)