July 2009

With the Left weakened electorally and the United Progressive Alliance Government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh free to chart its own policy course, the corporate sector had been expecting the new regime’s first Budget to be what business commentators euphemistically call “investor friendly”. But while there were rich pickings for key companies in specific sectors, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget speech on Monday made it clear there would be no early deviation from the steady (…)

Slightly more than two years ago, the worst recession since the Great Depression, set in, notwithstanding all the claims from big-wigs of economic science that the days of ups and downs were long past. It was recalled that similar claim was made on October 15, 1929 when one of the tallest economists of America, Irving Fisher of the Yale University, declared that stock prices had reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Just a fortnight after this claim, Wall Street went down, (…)

The following piece reached us late and could not be published before the presentation of the Union Budget. It is being carried now as its contents continue to be relevant.
It is characteristic of the Central Budget that only three per cent of its expenditure goes to agriculture along with animal husbandry, soil and water conservation, irrigation, cooperation, storage and warehousing, crop insurance, watershed development, wasteland and rain fed area development agricultural education etc. (…)

Israelis are realists par excellence. This is why it is always gainful to buttonhole an Israeli counterpart over a single-malt on the diplomatic circuit. He will invariably weave into the tapestry of the plain tale a nylon thread until then obscure to the naked eye.
Thus, the first warning that the adventurous project to mount a “Twitter revolution” in Iran was doomed to fail had to come from the Israelis. It meshes well with the indications that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s (…)

In a historic judgement, a two-judge Delhi High Court Bench comprising Chief Justice A.P. Shah and Justice Murlidharan has on July 2 decriminalised non-heterosexual sex between consenting adults. In an eloquently argued judgement of 150 pages, the Bench has struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), a colonial legislation drafted by Lord Macaulay in 1860, that criminalised “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” punishable by imprisonment extending up to ten years. (…)

A spate of articles are appearing in periodicals on the debacle of the Left in the recent parliamentary elections. They are descriptive and do not go into the correct cause. The CPM leaders attribute it to the futility of the Third Front and to the blunder of withdrawing from the UPA on the issue of the atomic agreement.
The Economic Conjecture
Kripa Shankar comes closest to the correct diagnosis in his paper in Mainstream (June 12-18, 2009). To quote him:
The Congress had enacted (…)

In a seminal lecture (2005), the eminent political theorist, Partha Chatterjee, argued that upto the end of the 1970s ideology played an important role in Indian politics. The popularity of a political leader depended on the sacrifices she/he made. But, a new paradigm has emerged in Indian politics in the last three decades. The present-day political leaders seem to be self-centred, opportunist, greedy and consumerist persons. Ordinary people are forced to negotiate with such local leaders (…)

First the panchayat elections last year, then the Lok Sabha elections this May, and now the municipal polls. The CPI-M’s downhill journey to defeat, disgrace, despair and eventual dislodgement from power continues. One need not be an astrologer or a psephologist to predict that the curtains on the party’s 34 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal will be finally rung down in the State Assembly elections in 2011.
The civic election results are significant because they reflect the (…)

Intellectuals concerned with issues of people have been under attack in recent years in different states. The Karnataka Government had prepared a list of teachers of colleges, editors of newspapers and some NGOs alleging them to be close to the Naxals in the State because of their involvement in the anti-communal struggle. A group of them including Girish Karnad, Professor Govind Rao, Dr Sridhar and a host others were arrested in 2003 when they had gone to participate in a rally in support (…)

I
Wasn’t there a playwright who penned Six Characters in Search of an Author?
Well, India has a “major” political party that seems forever in search of a programme.
It is called the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But, hang on; unlike the famous play cited above, the BJP’s interminable project is, in fact, not to find the author/programme but to constantly hide the one and only it has.
That author of its unreal being is the RSS, the so-called cultural organisation (…)