2010

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
This article was written by N.C. forty years ago as ‘Observer’ in Mainstream (May 2, 1970) at the height of the first wave of the Naxalite movement. The spate of terrorist violence in West Bengal has pin-pointed public attention on what has come to be known as the Naxalite problem. Many so-called specialists on communism have aired very profound views on the nature of this phenomenon and have not hesitated to deliver homilies on how to deal with it.
The Union Home (…)

In between the country’s most tragic air accident in a decade at the Mangalore airport in the early hours of May 22 and the former Haryana DGP, S.P.S. Rathore, being sent to jail following his sentence to one-and-a-half years behind bars on May 25 (20 years after he had molested 14-year-old Ruchika Girhotra forcing her to commit suicide when he dodged the judicial system by misusing his office and intimidatory tactics) came the Prime Minister’s first fully-publicised press conference since (…)

It is quite a well-known fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Americans are at odds with one another. Rumours are rapidly spreading with effortless ease that US President Barack Obama dislikes Karzai and his distaste for the latter is growing. As a consequence Karzai is becoming defiant and even promising to join the Taliban and carry out unspeakable acts to defend the honour and independence of the Afghan fatherland. However, at the same time behind-the-scenes the US authorities (…)

(On May 27 this year falls the 46th death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister, widely known as the architect of modern India. On this occasion we are carrying some relevant excerpts from his writings and speeches for the benefit of our readers. We are also reproducing articles by distinguished public figure and women’s leader Aruna Asaf Ali, historian Bipan Chandra, and writer and littérateur Mulk Raj Anand that came out in a volume at the time of Nehru’s birth (…)

TRIBUTE
Bihar lost one of the ikons of the JP movement, Acharya Rammurty, on May 20, 2010, which has been widely mourned. He was a man of immense learning reflected in his honorific title of Acharya, lovingly conferred on him by the people.and acknowledged by JP by nominating him as his second-in-command of the Bihar movement. He was one of the few people JP took counsels from. Post-JP he was the most respected leader of the followers of JP who would rally to his call whenever he made (…)

The country is in a vortex of challenges, counter-challenges and suspicious suggestions even amongst good friends on the desirability or otherwise of inclusion of caste in Census 2011. I feel that a calmer discussion may clear a number of cobwebs.
It is common ground that the caste system exists in our country since centuries. It is unnecessary to dilate upon the origin of caste; whether due to the freezing of the guild system, helped and encouraged no doubt by the Brahamanical (…)

Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution in the post-independence years to improving the status of Indian women, specially through the reform of Hindu law, is part of recent history and is fairly well known. In this article I shall attempt, as one who was a witness to and participant in the freedom struggle in an earlier era, to narrate to the present generation the story of how Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, between them, exercised an alchemy that turned the common clay of Indian humanity into (…)

We, who have lived through one part or the other of the Nehru era, look back on that period with nostalgia as a sort of Golden Age; we tend to regard those times as the “good old days”. In fact, those years were, more than at present, filled with poverty and misery. Yet, the existence of a Jawaharlal Nehru made all the difference.
Nehru’s place in history would be assured by the leader’s role he played in the anti-imperialist struggle. As a national liberator, he was second only to (…)

Destination Man was the ideal of advance for our people, which Jawaharlal Nehru put forward in one of his earliest speeches in Parliament after our freedom.
Growing from within the two worlds of Asia and the West, aware of the heritage of ruin of feudal wars, imperial hegemonies and two big bloodbaths of the world, he wanted, specially the freed peoples of the ex-colonies, to emerge into a world without war, in a hundred years of peace—by which he meant peace forever.
And (…)

The week that marked the twentyfifth anniversary of the passing away of Jawaharlal Nehru—on May 22, 1989, India projected a political image of its strength and determination before the world which no amount of borrowed arsenal could have achieved. The firing of the intermediate range missile, Agni, hitting a target of a thousand kilometres away was not just an engineering feat, its importance lies in the fact that it was designed and manufactured in India by our scientists—no mean (…)