2010

by Abhay Sahoo
Today (October 18, 2000), three of the four members of the Committee set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests confirmed that the POSCO project is illegal and that all of its clearances were obtained by breaking the law. The Committee has also found that the project has potentially very dangerous impacts on issues like water, air pollution, and the coastline, and none of this was ever properly evaluated. After a detailed discussion of the huge number of criminal (…)

TRIBUTE
An Indian Airlines flight arrived at the Agartala Airport one late afternoon. It was a full flight. All the passengers scrambled down to pick up their baggage and leave for home. Among them was a short-statured, frail, middle-aged person wearing an ordinary bush shirt and slightly crumpled trousers. The only remarkable feature was his thick crop of well-parted shining black hair. He saw some flamboyant busybodies briskly moving up and down in search of somebody. The gentleman (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
November nineteenth is Indira Gandhi’s birthday. Normally, her birthday so far has been a very private affair, not an event in the public calendar. Not so this year. If anything, it brings out in bold relief the strange convergence of events, unconnected with each other, but together generating tensions that add up to a first-class crisis. At the age of sixtyfive, the Prime Minister of India faces challenges which she finds difficult to overcome, largely because of the (…)

Joy erupted within the establishment in New Delhi late on Tuesday evening (October 12) as news arrived from New York regarding India’s election to a non-permanent two-year Asian seat in the United Nations Security Council. A dutiful media ecstatically tagged along. The infectious excitement was not without good reason.
A 19-year slice of memory was definitively breaking away—dating to the dark day when India was badly bruised as it contested against Japan and received hardly (…)

Most people believe that there is a divine law, the details of which are a matter of faith, since the existence of each person’s God can neither be proved nor disproved. One can only pray, “Ishwar-Allah tero naam, sab ko sanmati de bhagawan” for communal harmony and peace. But why discuss this now? The reason is the troubled Ayodhya—Babri mosque-Ram Janmabhoomi issue—that has come to a critical juncture with the split Allahabad High Court verdict of September 30, 2010.
Matters of (…)

Two momentous developments took place in the second half of September. An all-party delegation of parliamentarians visited Kashmir to study the ground reality at first hand; and following the visit, an eight-point package was announced by the Government of India. The all-party delegation of MPs symbolised the whole of India’s interest (i) in Kashmir’s sentiments and views about their future, and (ii) in knowing precisely the factors that gave rise to the unrest.
The eight-point (…)

MUSINGS
[The following piece was sent to us quite sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.]
It pained me to read of Sikhs receiving threats in the Valley and as I sat back wondering the whys to it, I found it almost unbelievable. For all along, all these years, even during the peak of the earlier crisis phases, I always saw great unity between the Valley Sikhs and the Muslim population. In fact, the bonding seemed perfect, with just about no hint or a strain (…)

by Sajad Padder
One does not have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of the Kashmir issue which has been like a thorn in Indo-Pak relations for over sixty years. How different that relation-ship might have been, had there not been this interminable dispute over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir! Open borders and unrestricted movement between one country and another, such as now occurs throughout Europe; trade, cultural, educational, social exchanges, free (…)

by Sumit Chowdhury
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...
—Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Reflecting on the historic people’s movements in West Bengal in recent years, my mind harks back over and over again to those immortal lines from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Indeed, for someone who has been involved with Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh in (…)

[(October 20 this year marks the fortyeighth anniversary of the Sino-Indian border war that witnessed the first ever bloody conflict between the two Asian giants resulting in heavy casualties on the Indian side. On this occasion we are reproducing the following article that appeared on the twentieth anniversary of the border conflict in Mainstream (October 1982). Its author, Dr Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea, an acknowledged authority on China’s international relations, passed away in New Delhi on (…)