2011

by NIVEDITA MENON
WE SHOULD BE THERE
My head has been in a whirl the past few days with a single question – how do we on ‘the Left’ manage so unerringly to be exactly where ‘the people’ are not, time after time?
At this moment I don’t mean the organised Left, for the Left parties have been cautious about criticising the current upsurge; they strongly defended the right to democratic protest when Anna Hazare and his colleagues were arrested, and now have launched a Third Front (…)

[The following is a piece the author wrote as a response to an article by Gail Omvedt. Since that article is not being carried here, we have omitted references to it in the first few lines. Otherwise the article has been used in full. —Editor]
I think the older generation of Left activists are by and large failing to come to terms with an unfamiliar form of protest in the IT-age. For them perhaps, Tahrir Square looks full of promise at a distance from where all the finer dark spots get (…)

by VINITA DESHMUKH
The snobbery of intellectual writers and insensitivity of the political class comes as a shame at this defining moment in our country’s history. Let’s show some respect to this mass awakening, so essential for a vibrant democracy and a pro-active citizenry.
Propagators of mass hysteria and mobocracy have one thing in common—they refuse to get out of their mindset and understand the new wave of mass participation, so essential for a vibrant democracy, that is now (…)

The sprawling CWG’s stadium unfolded A large spectrum of corruption running into megabucks The CWG stadium— The doom of festivity, the doom of fidelity
2G spectrum stood towering even higher That echoed clangour of corruption even louder.
Heaps of corruption— Corruption after corruption. United people to roar against corruption All seem to support the campaigns that some Gandhians initiated. I too added my voice against.
I was given the responsibility to enlist some corruptions And (…)

Would it be fair to assume that Anna Hazare and his team have scored a major victory by apparently compelling the Parliament to yield to their demands? Undeniably, the Central Government has given the impression of having conceded to the Hazare team by holding a special parliamentary session to discuss Hazare’s demands. At the end of the day (August 27), it was agreed by all parliamentarians to convey a “sense” of the Parliament to the Standing Committee scrutinising the Bill. The issues (…)

A friend (another grouchy old man like me) says that it is impossible to wipe out corruption in India. He says that we Indians always want things out of turn, we want things and privileges to which we are not entitled, that we are unwilling to wait for others or with them. He gives the example of a queue at a post office, which is never straight and orderly because no one wants to wait his turn and so tries to jump ahead. Another example is the car driver who is not content to stay behind (…)

Karl Marx talked about class divisions and two warring classes. I assume that was valid in his time. But it had lost its relevance since long. The society has got divided in tens of classes in a country like India. And if the society has so many classes, one cannot organise it according to Marxian thoughts characterised by class interest.
But, of late, these tens of classes have organised themselves in two broad categories in our country: one category is referred to as the ‘common man’; (…)

by NIRMALYA
Political activism is not new in India. India has had a long tradition of political activists, usually Leftists or Gandhians. Yet when we look at the way the Anna Camp has done things, it is clearly different from the usual cases of activism. It has not been only more popular than perhaps any other movement, it has also been better managed, better marketed, more ambitious, more impatient, more populist, less concerned with ideology and more practical than any other example of (…)

COMMUNICATION
I have seen Shri Alok Bajpai’s article on ‘Duragraha’ (“Duragraha in the Name of Satyagraha: A Gandhian Perspective” in the Mainstream issue of July 30, 2011) in which he has concluded that the peaceful and non-violent Satyagraha by Gandhiji was conceived as a strategy against the British rule and that ‘once people were free and had a parliamentary government, the legislature can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and non-violence’. This was Gandhiji’s (…)

The statement following the meeting of the State Committee of the Communist Part of India- Marxist in Kolkata taking exception to the agitational methods of Anna Hazare gives a sickening feeling that the party’s State leadership remembers nothing about its debacle in its 30-year old citadel just a few months ago. The CPM should have been the first to know that debunking Mamata Banerjee’s agitation took it nowhere and landed it in a cul-de-sac. The heart of the matter is that laws will be (…)