Table of Contents - Mainstream, Vol 63 No 19, May 10, 2025

In this issue:

• Letter to the Readers, Mainstream — May 10, 2025 [appear on May 11]
• The Patriarchy Behind the Naming of India’s Military’s Operation in Response to Pahalgam Killings | Papri Sen Sri Raman
• How to Prevent the Drift toward High-Risk War Caused by Step-by-Step Escalation | Bharat Dogra
• Logic and reasoning in the time of war | M K Bhadrakumar
• The Indo-Pak Ceasefire : Some Tentative Observations | P. S Jayaramu
• The Uncharted Trajectory of India and Pakistan Conundrum | Ajay Kumar Mishra
• Victims of Hyper-Nationalism in India | Arup Kumar Sen
• Post Pahalgam attack: How BJP has successfully subordinated diplomacy to the politics of communal polarization? | Sanjay Kumar Singh
• What Should India’s Approach to the Pahalgam Terror Attack be? | Gouri Sankar Nag & Ajay Majumder
• Banality of dusk and dawn – the trials of the educated woman | Swaswati Borkataki
• Waqf In Transition: Reform, Resistance, And The Road Ahead | Lakshmi Karlekar, Tanishaa Pandey
• Cheena Bhavan and the Building of a New Human Civilisation | Nandita Chaturvedi
• Poem on War & Destruction (1937) | Rabindranath Tagore
• Setback for Dissanayake’s NPP in Sri Lanka local govt elections | M.R. Narayan Swamy
• Israel’s Defiant Posture on UN Aid to Gaza and Palestinians: Can the International Court of Justice Make any Difference? | Gautam Sen
• How will US tariffs affect the pharmaceutical industry? | Martha Rosenberg

DOCUMENTS:

• UN Secretary-General asks Pakistan & India to avoid a military confrontation
• Urgent Call for Peace by Indian and Pakistani Feminists
• EGI Statement on the Blocking of 4PM News Network YouTube Channel
• An Indo-Pak War will harm citizens in both countries — Statement from Trade Unions
• A Pakistani Left Party expresses disappointment with the statements of CPI and CPM on India’s military strikes on Pakistan | May 2025
• De-Escalate, avoid another India-Pakistan war —Statement by CPI(ML) Liberation on launch of Operation Sindoor
• Statement by Pakistan’s Haqooq e Khalq party (HKP) on escalating tensions between Pakistan and India [May 7, 2025]
• Statement from Leftists on the current confrontation between the governments of India & Pakistan
• CNDP, NAAM and IDPD Statement of concern over the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan

BOOKS

• What if Sitaram? | Papri Sen Sri Raman
• Afghan women who refused to bow to the Taliban | M.R. Narayan Swamy

IMAGE & SOUND:

• Cartoon: China - America, India - Pakistan Spat| Awantha Artigala
• Video Recording: Ursula Huws — The Household in Marx’s ’Capital’
• Film: Fear (1965) | Ritwik Ghatak

Editor’s Picks:

• A massacre has reignited the forever war between India and Pakistan – once more, Kashmiri voices are missing
• Editor’s Note: No solution in Kashmir without the people of Kashmir
• A call for collective sanity in these violent times
• Modi’s U Turn on the Caste Census
• India’s complex history cannot be wished away through textbook revisions
• Breach of Faith: The persecution of Christians in Uttar Pradesh
• Tracing the evolution of India’s labour laws
• From Pahalgam, Voices that Ought to Shame the Sectarian Zealot
• Pakistan’s Najam Sethi on Escalating India-Pakistan Tensions
• “A Dangerous Escalation”: India Bombs Pakistan in Intensification of “Forever War” over Kashmir
• On the Brink?
• "Suicidal Concept": Bangladeshi Islamists Protest Women’s Rights Reforms
• Dave Spooner obituary
• Hundreds evacuated from LoC, border in J-K
• Tender, Compassionate, Crushing: the Fiction of Shulamith Firestone
• Israel, Gaza, and the Starvation Weapon: The ICC Tests a Rarely Prosecuted War Crime
• ‘There is no life here’: Palestinians say Israel is imposing its Gaza endgame
• Minerals, mobile phones and militias: how war unfolded in DRC

* (Cover page artwork credits: Make Chai, Not War, H Kapoor, May 2025)