2011

The Cabinet reshuffle—essentially a defeatist’s exercise—had raised major issues concerning the morality of coalition politics and the govern-ment’s very approach to governance. The ensuing public discourse reflected serious worries across the political spectrum about the way the country was going. Presumably that debate could have at least led to a clearer understanding of how not to handle high responsibility.
But suddenly debate is disrupted, life itself is derailed and everybody’s (…)

by BHAVNA SINGH
The 10th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Astana (Kazakhstan) concluded with the members hailing the ‘Shanghai Spirit’ in determining a ‘new security order’ in Asia and adopting multilateral management as their future agenda. Several agreements were signed to promote regional trade and economic cooperation. The summit proposed to establish an energy club, an SCO development bank and a food security cooperation mechanism in order to encourage regional (…)

Of late I was intrigued by two separate headings on the front page of a local newspaper. “Tusker strays into Mysore city, kills one, injures four”. Another one goes: “Two elephants seriously hurt after being hit by train in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district”. What are we talking about? It highlights ‘man-animal conflict’. Man-animal conflict occurs when animals damage agri-cultural crops and property, kill livestock or attack people because of degradation and fragmentation of wildlife (…)

If actions speak louder than words, then the government has just spoken loud and clear. There could be no stronger indication of the government’s lack of serious intent in building an effective anti-corruption regime than the decision to remove the Central Bureau of Investi-gation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) law.
Without any discussion in the public domain, the government has decided to use Section 24 of the RTI Act to exempt the CBI—a decision with (…)

by NARAYANI GUPTA
There are individuals who have made a difference – to other individuals, to a community, to a nation. Hence the cliché “His/her name will go down in history.” But we must take into account how much time an individual is given. The reason I am here today, in a city I last knew in 1946, is because we are meeting to remember an individual who was born in 1953, whose life was brutally cut down when she was 53. The subject of my lecture is another individual, born almost (…)

In a long-lasting pan-Indian narrative of caste and its stereotypes, the question of spatial variations had remained sidelined especially until the early 1980s when a distinct regional contrast in kinship, marriage, and female status between north/north-western regions and the large southern peninsula of India began to be brought to the limelight in social science discourse. In this view, the ‘north’ is depicted as having more starkly patriarchal kinship, with such (unenviable) concomitants (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
Half-way through the crucial elections to the State Assemblies, with Arjun Singh having been expelled from the Congress, it is a twilight zone of Indian politics. Reactions are many and varied, expectations galore.
The fact that Narasimha Rao has suddenly exerted himself in both his avatars—as the Congress President making a short shrift of Arjun Singh throwing him out of the party, and as the Prime Minister going in for the long-awaited induction into the (…)

“After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided its time underground; the mountains were retreating to their hill-stations for the warm season.“
—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, p. 5
In such a landscape, as Aadam Aziz set foot on the streets of Srinagar, he was fortunate not to observe any Army camp on the lakeside. He was privileged not to exchange unfriendly stares with any khaki-clad (…)

A sensitive writer and poet Shiela Gujral, 87, passed away peacefully in New Delhi on Monday, July 11, 2011 leaving behind her grief-stricken ailing husband Inder Kumar Gujral, our former Prime Minister (1997-98). As a token of our tribute to her abiding memory we are reproducing the following reviews of her books by noted personalities that appeared in Mainstream at different times. The first one is by Bhabani Sen Gupta, the well-known strategic expert, litterateur and a good friend of the Gujrals; he himself passed away on January 18 this year. The second is by K.S. Duggal, the distinguished writer and a former nominated Member of the Rajya Sabha.

Terror has returned to Mumbai. As The Times of India wrote bringing out the trauma of the people residing in the premier metropolis, the country’s commercial and industrial nerve-centre,
No other city in the world has been the target of as many serial terror attacks and bombings as Mumbai, which went through the agony in 1993, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2008 and now July 13, 2011. On Wednesday evening, three serial bomb blasts in the span of ten minutes ripped through three of the busiest hubs in (…)