2010

Dear Mr Chidamabaram,
This is in reference to the press release by the Union Home Ministry which has warned ‘civil society groups, non-governmental organisations, intellectuals and the general public’ to refrain from ‘supporting the CPI(Maoist) ideology’ as it will attract action under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. It warned that under Section 39 of the Act, “any person who commits the offence of supporting such a terrorist organi-sation with inter alia intention to (…)

We have for over a century been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot, choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our own helplessness, and overwhelmed by the speed. We agreed to acknowledge that this chariot-drive was progress, and the progress was civilisation. If we ever ventured to ask, ‘progress towards what, and progress for whom’, it was considered to be peculiarly and ridiculously oriental to entertain such ideas about the absoluteness of progress. Of late a (…)

Former Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, 86, who was a three-time non-Congress CM of Rajasthan, passed away in Jaipur on May 15 following a heart attack. He headed the first non-Congress government in the State in 1977 and was an able administrator. An ajatashatru in the literal sense of the word, Shekhawat was above petty party politics when it came to upholding the interests of the nation. In this respect there was much in common between him and erstwhile PM A.B. Vajpayee. Both (…)

[May 5 this year marked the one hundred and ninetysecond birth anniversary of Karl Marx. On this occasion we remember that immortal revolutionary with the following excerpts from his unforgettable writings and speeches. —Editor]
“In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive (…)

While Conservative leader David Cameron took over on May 11 as Britain’s 53rd PM with the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg as his deputy in the first coalition government in the UK in 65 years, in our country Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has become another member of the Union Council of Ministers to be suffering from the ‘foot-in-the-mouth’ syndrome. Ramesh’s statement in Beijing that India’s security establishment and Home Ministry were “paranoid”, “alarmist” and (…)

The gruesome killing of three—a girl and two young men—at Mehrana, a village near Mathura on the UP-Rajasthan border on March 27 has spread shock waves.
The inhumanity of the lynching of the three on the order of the village panchayat brings out the grotesque dimension of the prevailing social inequity in our country. The original report said that the girl had eloped with one of the young men, while the other had helped them to go away. The girl belonged to a Jat family while the (…)

(On May 9 this year the world marked the sixtyfifth anniversary of Victory over Fascism, the menace that threatened the entire globe in the forties of the last century. The event was befittingly observed with a spectacular military parade at Moscow’s Red Square on May 9 emphasising East-West military cooperation that helped defeat fascism in Europe—for the first time ever, serving US, British, French and Polish troops as well as servicemen from several former Soviet states joined over 10,000 (…)

[On Arundhati Roy’s Essay on Maoists in Chhattisgarh
Noted author Arundhati Roy’s 32-page essay on Maoists in Chhattisgarh—“Walking With The Comrades” (Outlook, March 29, 2010)—has caused ripples in different circles. Veteran journalist B.G. Verghese wrote a piece—“Daylight At The Thousand-Star Hotel” (Outlook, May 3, 2010)—criticising Arundhati’s essay. Thereafter former Secretary, Union Ministry of Rural Development, and architect of ‘Operation Barga’ in West Bengal, D. (…)

Roy’s distorted Maoist idyll aside, tribals are non-development’s casualties
The CRPF massacre in Dantewada was brutal though avoidable, with two beheadings thrown in for bestiality. The Rammohan inquiry will tell us more about what happened. It was done, Arundhati Roy informs us (Walking With The Comrades, March 29), by “Gandhians with a gun”, with the timely reminder that there is no humbug about her Maoist Gandhians. They fight to protect beautiful tribal homelands against the state, (…)

Ms Arundhati Roy’s “Walking With The Comrades” (Outlook, March 29, 2010) is one of the finest pieces of political travelogue in the current Indo-English literature. It compares well with the classic socio-political writings about the Chinese Revolution like Red Star Over China, Fan Shen, The Scalpel and the Sword and the like. Any convulsive political event does produce such literature from the pens of sensitive and empathic writers.
That such a piece would create discomfort and (…)