2010

From all accounts the first trip to India of the first African American President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, has been successful. Not only was Obama’s spellbinding oratory, in full display at the Parliament’s Central Hall (where he addressed the joint session of the two Houses—the high point of the visit), full of substance alongside predictable rhetoric, he positively responded to almost all the concerns articulated by the Indian side vis-à-vis Pakistan and 26/11 (that is, (…)

by K.B.
For long, India’s political discourse has been dominated by what Pakistan does in the inter-national fora vis-a-vis India. Pakistan has a particularly typical history as far as multilateral organisations are concerned. Most recently, a junior level official of Pakistani origin ended up speaking for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon on the Kashmir issue embarrassing both the UN and India. Every multilateral forum has been used by Pakistan to highlight issues that mark the soft spots (…)

DOCUMENTS
The following are the Joint Statement of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama at the end of the summit level Indo-US talks in New Delhi on November 8, 2010, and US President Barack Obama’s address to the Joint Session of both Houses of Parliament on November 8, 2010.
Reaffirming their nations’ shared values and increasing convergence of interests, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama resolved today in New Delhi to expand and strengthen (…)

The following article reached us too late for publication before President Obama’s visit to India. We are publishing it now in the hope that its message will reach the US President. —Editor
Dear President Obama,
Your rise to the US Presidency raised expectations of the Black races and the downtrodden peoples of the world. Your fight, in the first year of your governance, for extending the health insurance cover to the unprivileged sections of the American people, earned people’s (…)

Mr Vice President, Madame Speaker, Mr Prime Minister, Members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and most of all, the people of India.
I thank you for the great honour of addressing the representatives of more than one billion Indians and the world’s largest democracy. I bring the greetings and friendship of the world’s oldest democracy—the USA, including nearly three million proud and patriotic Indian Americans.
Over the past three days, my wife Michelle and I have experienced the (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
One of the striking impressions of the AICC pilgrims returning from Bombay is about the Prime Minister’ style in dealing with the critics of government policies.
This question is not something which came up all of a sudden at the Bombay AICC. In fact it has become the subject matter of avid gossips and discussions in the Capital for the last few weeks, particularly since the Prime Minister’s return from the USA. From the person-to-person broadcast to the press (…)

November 14 this year marks Jawaharlal Nehru’s one hundred and twentyfirst birth anniversary. On this occasion we are publishing the following excerpts from Panditji’s speeches, writings and interviews carried in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (edited by Sarvepalli Gopal). Thereafter we are reproducing three articles on Nehru by noted writer late Sajjad Zaheer (who played a seminal role in the Afro-Asian writers’ movement and was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan in (…)

I loved and respected him, worked with him and even followed him in many ways, and yet I was among his severest critics, and perhaps no one was a greater disappointment to me and to my group than Jawaharlal Nehru.
Our two families were known to each other, from Lucknow and Allahabad, so it was not difficult for me when I came back from England in 1935, an Oxonian and a barrister-at-law, to be taken under the protective wing of Nehru. He knew, of course, that I was a red-hot Communist, but (…)

Jawaharlal Nehru was not the only aristocrat who entered politics and joined the struggle for independence in India. There were also others who came from similar background of secure family roots, extravagance and style, and who courted imprisonment, flirted with hardship and enjoyed the luxury of sacrifice.
If Nehru was a romantic, a politician who was more a poet than a schemer, a revolutionary who loved to philosophise more than to operate, he was not the only one of that kind in (…)

by Puran Chandra Joshi
Dr Arjun Sengupta’s article on ‘Nehru and Indian Socialism’ is full of new insights and understanding which deserve wide discussion among socialists in India.
Dr Sengupta has made an important methodo-logical departure. He suggests that to judge Nehru’s contribution to socialism from the yardstick of “scientific socialism” would be a mistake. Indeed, this doctrinaire approach has for long been a source of great confusion and error. Nehru was significant not as a (…)