2011

While there has indeed been a temporary relief in the US debt crisis with President Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties—the Republicans and Democrats—disclosing late on July 31 that they had agreed to cut trillions of dollars in federal spending over the next decade and thus pave the way for enhancing the government’s borrowing limit, in India there seems to be no end to the political drama in both the Capital or the States.
At the moment all eyes are riveted to Bengaluru as (…)

[(On August 8 this year falls the 22nd day of Sravana. On that day in the Bengali year 1348, Rabindranath Tagore had breathed his last a few minutes past noon. That year, 1941 AD, the 22nd day of Sravana fell on August 7. Every year it is on the 22nd day of Sravana (according to the Bengali calendar) that Tagore’s death anniversary is observed. This time it is the seventieth anniversary of the poet’s death that we will observe early next week. On this occasion we are remembering him and (…)

August 9, 1971 was a memorable day. On that day the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation was signed. This acted as a reliable shield defending India’s independence during the Indira Gandhi Government’s extension of fraternal assistance for helping the East Pakistani people attain freedom from West Pakistani yoke at the fag end of 1971. On the fortieth anniversary of these momentous developments, we reproduce N.C.’s following pieces written as ‘Political Notebook’ in (…)

Rewriting Constitutions comes easy to Latin American leaders. Brazil has modified its 1988 Constitution 14 times. Chile has changed its 1980 Constitution seven times. Colombia has added 16 modifications to its 1993 Constitution. Does it show Latin America’s growing impatience with the non-performing models? Or are they undermining democratic principles in the name of pursuing more radical agenda? What Bolivia and Ecuador have done in recent years begs a serious analysis.
Ecuador and (…)

One of the features of a modern democratic set-up is its inherent contradiction. Like the necessity of thesis and antithesis acting simul-taneously it relies upon opposing trends to propel it. To keep a vast social network together, in a meaningful co-existence and in a more-or-less harmonious mode of existence, is a challenging but manageable task, if that kind of challenge is understood and acknowledged by the people at the helm of affairs supposedly responsible for managing the show. The (…)

The Unique Identification (UID) project, also known as Aadhaar, has been pushed into implementation by the creation of a UID Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2009. It is slated to spend Rs 45,000 to Rs1,50,000 crores with a sanctioned budget of Rs 3000 crores without approval of Parliament. Nandan M. Nilekani has been nominated to head the UIDAI and accorded a Cabinet Minister’s rank. [Note 1] This is not unconnected with the publication of his book Imagining India in 2009, and his former (…)

by SUDEEP BASU
The felt need is to move away from the ‘custodialisation’ framework of anti-beggary laws to one that stresses on ‘vocationalisation’ or skill building exercises for beggars.
For several decades beggars fending for themselves on the streets of Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata have been at the mercy of anti-beggary laws meant to create aesthetically appealing and ‘livable’ cities. In August 2010 the media reported a high incidence of death of the inmates in a beggars’ colony in (…)

In the death of more than 120 people in the beggars’ colony in Bangalore managed by the State in August 2010 due to total apathy and indifference by the officials of the Karnataka State, the question that is raised is whether the beggars living in the colony have rights. It was difficult to ascertain the exact reasons for the deaths. The authorities of the colony have claimed the deaths to be natural. Others suspect food poisoning or gastroenteritis. The colony residents say stale and (…)

”The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamo-fascism’—that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning—but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly White Europeans take to the streets to terrorise minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority,” Prof Dilip Simeon wrote to me in a message on my Facebook profile. This was after I wrote that zealots and terrorists of all sorts live in a zone where it (…)

While discoursing upon the prolonged golden age of India that existed before colonial subjugation made by the pauperised English Sovereign for terrorised plunder and proselytisation, Karl Marx wrote: “Oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of (…)