August 2009

The latest ethnic violence between Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese, that erupted in China’s Xinjiang province on July 5, has captured the attention of the global media and China watchers. The violence has deeply shattered the social-political life of the province, generating deep frustration among the local inhabitants; the orgy of violence was so powerful that a disturbed Hu Jintao, the President of China, had to leave the G-8 summit in Italy and rushed back to Beijing. The Chinese rulers (…)

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Churches in Nepal, the erstwhile Hindu Rashtra on the face of the earth, have maintained a unique tradition. They hold services on Saturdays because it is a public holiday when schools and offices are closed.
When Deepa Patrick, 22, and Celeste Joseph, 15, both from Patna, went to visit some of their relatives in Lalitpur, situated south of Kathmandu, they found this fact of Lalitpur’s Christian community’s social life very interesting. In one of her last e-mails to her parents (…)

Now that Kashmir is once again experiencing a traumatic period, we reproduce one of the most moving pieces of N.C. on a visit to Charar-e-Sharief after its destruction.
One month to date after the destruction of the shrine and mosque at Charar-e-Sharief, a team of journalists reached the township. As one looked round the ghastly devastation of rows of burnt houses with their walls standing as mute witnesses to the crime, spontaneously it came to one’s lips: if you have tears, prepare to (…)

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Kargil War, we reproduce S.C.’s following editorial in Mainstream (July 10, 1999).
Since ‘Operation Vijay’ was launched on May 26, India has suffered heavy casualties in the battlefield but eventually our valiant soliders and airmen have pushed the enemy close to the Line of Control achieving in the process remarkable successes. These successes have been capped by the recapture of the 16,500 feet-high strategically significant “most (…)

The government has been over zealous in bailing out the corporate sector. Revenue foregone through these measures has shot up from Rs 285052 crores in 2007-08 to Rs 418095 crores in 2008-09 or an increase of Rs 133043 crores in a single year (vide, Receipt Budget 2009-10 Annexure 13 Table 12). This constitutes 69 per cent of the aggregate tax collection. This has forced the government to borrow Rs 4 lakh crores in 2009-10 as against Rs 133287 crores in the Budget estimate of 2008-09. There (…)

One of the key promises made by Nitish Kumar after becoming the Chief Minister of Bihar was to carry out land reforms. Indeed, the deepest source of Bihar’s backwardness lies in the near-total absence of land reforms, and the setting up of a Land Reforms Commission (LRC) under the chairmanship of D. Bandyopadhyay, credited as a key architect of land reforms in West Bengal, was therefore widely welcomed by all well-wishers of the cause of development of Bihar. The Commission was initially (…)

Breakfast at terrorist-decorated Taj, with Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani on either side —what triumphant symbolism to crown Hillary Clinton’s public relations tour de force in India. But did it work? It did make possible one impossi-bility: uniting the BJP and the Communists in a common cause. They were equally agitated, as indeed were some ruling party MPs, over the “hidden details” of the agreements the American lady finalised with our government.
What offended them, and a lot of (…)