June 2009

While the Lalgarh operation involving the State and Central forces in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district is still on with the security forces unable to apprehend a single Maoist of eminence in the area, the people of the region are being subjected to extreme forms of hardship, attacks and torture as well as grave human rights violations.
Meanwhile the Centre has now officially banned the CPI (Maoist) as a terrorist organisation. Coming in the midst of the Lalgarh operation this (…)

The World Health Organisation has issued a warning that swine flu has assumed the threat of a pandemic disease, which is likely to visit scores of countries across the continents. The Government of India has invoked provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act 1897 to fight the impending catastrophe. Interestingly, the colonial authorities had enacted the law following the outbreak of plague that travelled from Munchuria to Bombay in 1896. It danced through the vast subcontinent with unfettered (…)

[rouge]West Bengal’s Lalgarh is very much in the news due to the para-military operation undertaken there by the Central and State forces to ostensibly fight the Maoists and eliminate them. In this context we present here a report of an all-India fact-finding team on the developments in Lalgarh much before the military operation began there on June 18, 2009. It gives a clear idea of the problems the people face in the area.rouge]
1. An all-India fact-finding mission consisting of ten (…)

By any standard, the violence against Indian students in Australia is nasty business. What lends an astonishing edge to it is the Indian Government’s routine, pedestrian, unfeeling handling of it. Indeed, non-assertiveness seems to be a characteristic of the Manmohan-Sonia leadership.
By contrast, Australia took a combative position. First, police bosses remained almost indifferent, refusing to see any racial angle in the repeated attacks on Indian students. At the political level, (…)

Dear President Obama,
Greetings from an Indian Muslim, a member of one of the non-majority communities of the ‘Muslim world’, who did not find any direct mention in your powerful, moving speech, delivered in Cairo on June 4, 2009 though Af-Pak region did figure as an area of your major concern. Listening to your speech live on television, I was touched by your sincere search for a new beginning in America’s relations with Muslims and Islam.
Since in your speeches you often (…)

The following article was written four years ago in 2005 soon after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory in the first presidential election in Iran. It is being reproduced here because of its current relevance.
Persians invented the game of chess. It seems to remain very much their game. It is “check-and-checkmate” in the epic game between Iran and the United States—for the second time in 27 years. There is dramatic irony in the leadership of the Islamic Government in Iran passing into (…)

Technology-driven industrialisation has necessarily caused a shift in human values, certainly among those sections of society that have benefited from industrialisation in India. Such people speak and think about liberty and freedom without stopping to think whether there are others who cannot even dream of those desirable conditions of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The freedom they seek is to “consume” without the responsibility of leaving something for others, or (…)

Lest We Forget
Thirtyfour years ago on June 26, 1975, Emergency was proclaimed throughout the country as the ruling leadership bared its fangs nakedly displaying its dictatorial proclivities. We present here write-ups and poems that bring back the nightmare of those dark days when our freedom was sought to be snatched away and our voice throttled. —Editor
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Not a leaf stirs in my kingdom without my leave. See how quiet my people sit.
—Atahuallpa the Inca
To those whose only (…)

The Editor’s Notebook in Mainstream (June 28, 1975) after the promulgation of Emergency and the imposition of press censorship appeared as follows:
Somewhere in the excitement of National Emergency, the editor has lost his notebook. However, Rabindranath Tagore has, in the abundance of his generosity, lent him his own notebook:
Freedom from fear is the freedom I claim for you, my Motherland!—fear, the phantom demon, shaped by your own distorted dreams;
Freedom from the burden of ages, (…)

Published in The Morning News—Sunday Times Service (London) on July 3, 1975. An introduction to the article read:
“An uncensored account from Jonathan Dimbleby who was in Delhi last week for the Thames Televivsion programme: ‘This Week’. He filed his report from Addis Ababa to avoid censorship.”
This was included in The Press She Could Not Whip: Emergency in India as Reported by the Foreign Press. —Editor
The famous Indian journalist sat in his silent office surrounded by (…)