2011

The recent Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Review Summit in New York, the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the United Nations Human Development Report 2010 serve as reminders for the urgent need to narrow the inequalities and disparities within and between countries to foster balanced development. Ten years on from the MDGs’ declaration to halve poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empowerment of women, reduce child mortality and improve maternal (…)

We didn’t need the leaked Palestine Papers—more than 1600 internal Palestinian documents summarising negotiations with Israel over the past decade—to know that the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is all but dead. The absence of a Palestinian state after nearly twenty years of the peace process hardly tells a different story. What comes shining through from these documents, however, is the courage of the Palestinian leaders in offering far-reaching concessions to their (…)

The CPI-M took its massive victory in the 2006 Assembly elections to be a mandate for its policy of industrialisation of West Bengal by evicting thousands of peasant families from their hearths and homes and their farmland and forcibly acquiring fertile multi-crop agricultural land and handing these over to industrialists for setting up industries. For this they invited Indian and foreign monopolists and unrolled the red carpet for them. Inevitably, such a policy was bound to be opposed by (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
(On March 4, 2011 former Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh, 81, passed away in New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Besides being an ardent loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family, he was a sturdy secularist and cast in the classic socialist-secular mould of Jawaharlal Nehru. Arjun Singh played a major role behind-the-scenes before the signing of the Rajiv-Longowal accord which, however, was short-lived due to the brutal assassination of the Akali leader. The (…)

UNLAWFUL OCCUPATION OF BABRI MASJID, ITS CONVERSION INTO A MANDIR AND SUBSEQUENT DEMOLITION
Communal politics, partition and the migration of the Muslim elite from UP to Pakistan had all cast their shadows on Ayodhya around independence and the tiny Muslim community (about five per cent) in that small town, stood demoralised and helpless. It was systemically harassed after independence came.
Ayodhya had been known for communal harmony and composite culture and as a meeting place of (…)

Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Raipur Sessions Court in Chhattisgarh for sedition on December 24, 2010. He was convicted under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005. It should be mentioned here that respected members of the Indian judicial system condemned the judgment. Justice (retired) Rajinder Sachar termed the judgment as “ridiculous and unacceptable”. Reacting to the judgment, senior (…)

The birth centenary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the most powerful Urdu poets of our subcontinent, was observed last month but even now several functions are being held in both Pakistan and India to commemorate the occasion and offer homage to his abiding memory. He was born in Sialkot on February 13, 1911. His father, Khan Bahadur Sultan Mohammad Khan, an eminent barrister, was a well-read person and enjoyed the company of distinguished literary figures; he also wrote the biography of Amir (…)

by S.M. Mehdi
Urdu can boast of many great poets—from Meer Taqi Meer of the 18th century to Josh, Firaq, Iqbal, Faiz and others of our own century. But few were recognised as great in their own life-time. Iqbal and Faiz were perhaps the only two exceptions. It may be said that Iqbal’s philosophy and his unique style were not taken up by any other poet after him. Faiz was, however, in many ways his successor. Faiz put Iqbal’s philosophy and world outlook on its feet and took from it the (…)

The following is the acceptance speech of Faiz Ahmed Faiz on receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962.
Creating words and shaping them in an orderly form is the vocation of poets and men of letters. But there are occasions in life when one is left speechless. This is one such occasion for me: I don‘t have the words with which to adequately thank the Lenin Peace Prize Committee, as well as other Soviet institutions and friends, for the honour they have conferred upon me. The Peace Prize is (…)

Eminent scholars, colleagues, friends and relatives of Prof Zahida Zaidi gathered at the Arts Faculty of the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh on March 1, 2011 to offer homage to Prof Zahida Zaidi, 82, the outstanding scholar, poet, dramatist, playwright and literary critic who breathed her last in Aligarh on January 11, 2011. The memorial meeting, held under the aegis of the Sabira Zaidi Memorial Trust, was presided over by Prof Irfan Habib, the renowned historian.
Born on January 4, (…)