2010

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
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 shed them now.
As one slowly climbed the stone slabs at the threshold of the complex, one could almost sense that on those stones have fallen for (…)

COMMUNICATION
In criticism of my article “Can the Left become the National Alternative (Mainstream, May 8, 2010), Sharad Patil, the General Secretary of the Satyashodhak Communist Party, has in his rejoinder “Can the Left (Communists) become the National Alternative?” (Mainstream, June 5, 2010) written: “All Lohiaites have formed, according to Mishra, casteist parties.” This is totally false. I have not written in my article anything regarding Lohiaites. Hence this is Asatyam Samarthan. (…)

Climate change is a very complex issue. In recent years, climate change and global warming have become matters of intense heated debate among policy-makers, analysts and acade-micians. At the same time, climate change has become an integral part of the growing literature on environmental discourse. The vagaries of climate change are unfolding in such a manner that it affects the security and well-being of all living beings. How is climate affected? How do we map climate change? What are the (…)

If it takes a thief to catch a thief, can we say it requires terrorism to defeat terrorism? That is the theory Mahenda Rajapakse put into practice in Sri Lanka. Because he succeeded in crushing Prabhakaran’s LTTE, the “Sri Lankan Model” is now attracting the attention of other governments that face internal insurrections.
Perhaps the most notable example is the not widely publicised visit Burma’s military dictator Than Shwe paid to Colombo recently. Than Shwe rarely travels outside his (…)

Last month it was written in these columns in Mainstream (June 19): What is most amazing is that at a time when inflation reigns high, the government is thinking of deregulation of the pricing of such intermediaries as petroleum products.
Now the government has actually gone in for decontrol of petrol prices and this has been predictably hailed by the industry as a whole as a “welcome move”. As the FICCI Secretary-General has observed, People tend to consume more fuel than necessary if (…)

The strategy devised at the London Conference on Afghanistan last January—“reintegration and reconciliation”—is a veiled scheme to once again hand over Afghanistan to Pakistan through the vehicle of the Taliban (whose acceptability is being sought to be ensured by the use of such an adjective as “moderate” which in reality is hollow, senseless and bereft of any meaning). US President Barack Obama’s rhetoric on the “Way Forward in Af-Pak” has the same thrust.
The consequences of this (…)

The Indian discourse on regional security has traditionally paid scant attention to the country’s extended neighbourhood of Central Asia. No discourse on the Afghan problem will be complete without co-relating it with the geopolitics of Central Asia, and yet our strategic thinkers somehow manage without it.
The crisis in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan no doubt holds out grave impli-cations for regional security and India cannot remain impervious to them. Kyrgyzstan too is a (…)

Ever since the Centre announced that it would collect data on various castes during the ongoing Census, the media has created a hue and cry saying that this would harm the nation and open a Pandora’s Box of caste conflicts. On the other hand, those who seek caste enumeration are of the view that this would clear the cobwebs and deliver proper data on other backward classes (OBCs) that will help implement reservation policies and welfare schemes better. The collection of caste data was not a (…)

It has become difficult to engage in an honest and objective discourse on policies overladen with the caste question if you happen to belong to the upper caste, lest you lose the trust of the OBC whose social and economic emancipation has been the passion of your life.
That is the reason why so many committed social workers of the upper caste have opted to join casteist parties; they would otherwise not have joined, because of their desire to express solidarity with their so-called lower (…)

In existence as an intractable institution since immemorial, caste is based on divine authority of unchallengeable sanctity. The Rig Vedas propounded it. Manu, Yajnavalkya, Parasara and many others trumpeted it in earshattering pitch. Every scripture, mythological fiction and ancient epic adopted this pre-ordained line and parroted it. As foot soldiers, sages and seers were in the forefront in preaching messages of divinity of caste across India. Given this historical background, the present (…)