2012

Who were the guilty men of India’s China war? This year, for the first time, the Defence Ministry paid homage to the soldiers who perished in that horror 50 years ago. But official reluctance to face facts continues. The Hender-son-Brooks inquiry report is still deemed secret although it leaked to Neville Maxwell, the Englishman who wrote the most anti-India account of the war. Even China has declassified its documents till 1965.
Generals who took part in the action like D.K. Palit (War in (…)

Howsoever absurd and tendentious it may seem to top official Communists from the 
CPI-M to Maoists and their fellow-travellers, the strategy for invading India on October 20 was finalised at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held in the last week of Septem-ber 1962, and the blueprint was presented by Chairman Ma Zedong in a secret speech, revealed in the early 1980s by Dr Hemen Ray, an outstan-ding scholar on Sino-Soviet matters in a (…)

TRIBUTE
by Ravela Somayya
The sudden death of Dr Paul Kurtz on October 20 in the USA at the age of 86 is a great loss to the world humanist movement. He was a renowned philosopher and founder editor of the Free Inquiry magazine. He was the founder of a publishing house, Prometheus Books, which was intended to propagate the values of humanism, secularism and free inquiry. He was also the founder of the Institute for Science and Humanism. He was the author of 40 books. In addition he (…)

by Sandhya Jain
While appreciating India Against Corruption’s putting the spotlight on Reliance Industries, its face-off with the CAG and reputed role in the exit of Jaipal Reddy from the Petroleum Ministry, the author would like to point out that she had written about the judiciary’s role in facilitating Reliance’s unreasonable demands nearly two years ago in a column in The Pioneer, (December 21, 2010), which appeared on Vijayvaani the same day [http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplay (…)

At the November 4 rally the Congress re-affirmed its strong commitment to outlining an agenda of so-called ‘economic reforms’ led by the growing inroads of multinational companies and foreign investment in retail trade and other critical areas of the economy. The possibility that this agenda can have serious long-term adverse impacts for the economy is not even being considered by the top leadership of the Congress.
All over the world there is growing evidence of the huge problems created (…)

The PM’s major reshuffle of the Union Cabinet and Council of Ministers has raised more dust and generated a bigger storm than what he had bargained for. The two most significant developments in this reshuffle were the promotion of Salman Khurshid to the office of the Minister for External Affairs from that of Law and Justice, and the shunting out of S. Jaipal Reddy to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Earth Sciences from that of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Leaders of India Against (…)

October 31 this year marked the twentyeighth anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. On this occasion we are carrying the following excerpts from an article published in this journal’s October 31, 2009 issue.
“The ‘Indira hatred’ slogan of her opponents has died with her, but for a long time the rallying cry in India was her call of ‘Garibi Hatao’ (end poverty). Witnesses bear testimony to the fact that where millions wept at her demise, beyond the family the sincerest tears were (…)

Dilip Hiro, a South Asia expert, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London). He contributes regularly for TomDispatch. The following article is being reproduced, with the author’s permission, from TomDispatch.com with due acknowledgement.
The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and (…)

Dr Binayak Sen, an internationally renowned medical practitioner and social activist (a leading figure in the People’s Union for Civil Liberties), was incarcerated in Chhattisgarh and held in detention in Raipur having been branded as a Maoist for his activities in defence of poor tribals in the State. He is now out on bail. The following is the text of the Arvind Narayan Das Memorial Lecture he delivered in New Delhi on October 6, 2012.
by BINAYAK SEN
Before we embark on our (…)

Dr Sunilam (ex-MLA) has been a consistent fighter for the cause of farmers for the last several years. He and two of his colleagues, Shesh Rao Suryavanshi and Prahalad Aggarwal, of the Kisan Sangharsh Samiti have been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Sessions Court of Multai, District Betul, Madhya Pradesh, on October 19, 2012 in the 14 year-old Multai Firing Case. There was an indiscriminate firing by the police on farmers gathered at Multai headquarters on January 12, 1998 under the (…)