2012

The India-China border question has reached the point of open armed conflict. The entire Chinese operation in the NEFA, started in September, was a premeditated affair, surpassing all that they had done in Ladakh in the past.
Why should the armed conflict in Ladakh have reached the NEFA region at all? The protest note submitted by the Chinese Government to India on October 10 gives the following explanation of this development: “….it (India) is determined to realise by armed attacks its (…)

by Bhagwat Jha Azad
History knows many a betrayal of friendship, but the one committed by the Chinese will go down in history as the most unfortunate and an unmatched instance of a friend being stabbed in the most treacherous and inhuman manner.
The Chinese we treated nicely. We gave them all support and help in their national issues and lent them prestige by taking them out of world isolation. We extended uniformly our hand of friendship and goodwill on the basis of recognition of each (…)

The following are excerpts from the speech that Deputy Leader of the united CPI Group in Parliament delivered on the Chinese aggression in the Lok Sabha on November 10, 1962.
Mr Speaker, Sir, I rise with a deep sense of responsibility in this grave hour of national emergency to pledge on behalf of my party our full support to the Prime Minister’s rallying call to the nation for national unity at this juncture of history when our country is facing a danger greater than it has ever faced (…)

by Muhammad Tajuddin
As a liberal intellectual, Nehru ‘discovered’ India not in the spirit of self-centricism but as a champion of internationalism. Indian nationa-lism is visible in all his three important works but nowhere he sounds xenophobic. India, as admitted by Nehru, is ‘present in his blood’ which he has explored and narrated in its neighbourhood that is Asia. Not only in Discovery of India but also in his Autobiobraphy and the Glimpses of World History he has presented a vivid (…)

by Tarun Patnaik
After the exposure of the power muscle of Mukesh Ambani over the functioning of the Congress, a few fundamental questions come to mind. It is clear that political parties need money to survive in the field of power politics because money plays a big role on which they can come to power.
Our electorate are quite amenable to short-term gains and short-term loyalty. Other than direct purchase of votes, there is the indirect effect of buying the power-brokers. Next comes the (…)

November 19 this year marks Indira Gandhi’s ninetyfifth birth anniversary. On this occasion we are reproducing the piece the former External Affairs Minister wrote in Mainstream (October 31, 2009). Natwar Singh worked under the late PM for several years.
From May 1966 to April 1971 I was working in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat (it was renamed Prime Minister’s Office by Morarji Desai). I was the first foreign service official to serve in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.
At that time (…)

BOOK REVIEW
A Fistful of Dry Rice: Land, Equity and Democracy: Essays in Honour of D. Bandyopadhyay by K.B. Saxena, Manoranjan Mohanty and Sumit Chkaravartty (editors); Aakar Books, New Delhi; pages: 434; Price: Rs 1295.
Debabrata Bandyopadhayay, a member of the Indian Administrative Service, was the man who carried out the ‘Operation Barga’ of the Left Front Government, which it continued to cash for three-and-a-half decades. It was its greatest achievement for which it claimed all (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
With American arms flown in in consi-derable quantity, along with defence weapons from other Western countries, the scales of non-alignment are threatened to be disturbed. While the allergy against Western arms has gone even in the case of the Indian Communists—such being the logic of the Chinese invasion of our motherland—the question has come up in a big way as to its impact on our foreign policy itself.
Although the Swatantra clamour for scrapping non-alignment (…)

August 2012 has much importance in the chronicle of communal politics in Kerala. For that was the month when leaders of two caste-based organisations decided to merge by forgetting all discords and enmities maintained by them for decades. Those were the SNDP of the Ezhavas and NSS of the Nairs. There is no official report regarding the number of members each caste has but it is believed that Ezhavas constitute 25 per cent and Nairs 15 per cent of the total population of the State. Both (…)

In the midst of the unending reports of scams, affecting both the principal constituent of the ruling UPA and the main Opposition party at the Centre, the latest predicament of the BJP President facing corruption charges buttressed by irrefutable media evidence and the crisis brewing within the organisation, as also the unequivocal pronouncements from the CAG accusing the Union Government functionaries of ‘brazen’ behaviour, the outcome of the US presidential election has come as a whiff of (…)