2012

IMPRESSIONS
We have had good governments and bad governments since independence. This is the first time we are having a government suspended in midair, unable to go up to heaven or come down to earth. In modernistic terms, it is comparable to the weightlessness astronauts experience inside space shuttles, a sort of floating, drifting existence.
Is democracy punishing us for playing tricks with it? We pretend, and tell the world, that the Manmohan Singh Government is in power in our (…)

“The most heinous and the most cruel crimes which history has recorded have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.” So said Mahatma Gandhi in 1921 in an address to the Congress party at Ahmedabad. Yet the religion-based parties have played havoc with the sentiments and aspirations of the people in the country. In the name of improving man’s character and convictions the parties have indulged in such acts which have fanned fundamentalism and ultimately (…)

A Supreme Court decision of September 26, 2012 was reported in the newspapers in a manner that suggested wishful thinking. Headlines are necessarily abbreviated, and those in this instance said that the SC had sent a message to “the police” about branding people on the basis of religion. The message, in fact, was specifically to the Gujarat Police: “District Superintendent of Police and Inspector General of Police and all others entrusted with the task of operating the law must not do (…)

BOOK REVIEW by Debraj Bhattacharya
Alternative Economic Survey, India 2011, Economic Growth and Development in India: Deepening Divergence; Yuva Samvad Prakashan, New Delhi; 2012; Rs 225.
This volume contains several essays by a distinguished group scholars affiliated to the Indian Political Economy Association on the negative aspects of the Indian political economy since the ‘liberalisation’ of the economy in the early nineties. In a way the volume is not just an Economic Survey for (…)

by R.G. Gidadhubli
In the third week of August 2012 the World Trade Organisation (WTO) admitted Russia as its 156th member. In fact the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had added another feather on his cap as the leader of Great Russia by putting his signature on July 19, 2012 on the agreement, ratified by the State Parliament (Duma) on July 10, for its accession to the WTO and thus ending Russia’s ordeal of waiting for this event for about 19 years. By joining this economic (…)

Recent times have witnessed a strange and disturbing phenomenon in the Indian parlia-mentary system, that of continued disruption and disturbance of the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament. Every right-thinking person will be highly disturbed by this tendency, as is clear also from several comments in the recent issues of Mainstream. Virtually no business was transacted in the current session of Parliament. Every time the Houses met to consider something or the other, they were (…)

As the monsoon session of Parliament comes to a close, a raging sense of democratic paralysis engulfs our democratic polity. The Parliament of India is a supreme body as a deliberative forum which represents the issues and concerns of the people of India at the apex level. This understanding of our legislature is put under a dark shadow when one views the recent washout of the monsoon session of Parliament.
The current monsoon session was stalled due to the Opposition’s strategy to (…)

MUSINGS
More of those dark realities stumbling out from Modi administered Gujarat. Those encoun-ters and mass murders and detentions…the sheer brutality hits. And one is left wondering the impact of this, on generations to come. For riots and communal violence not just kill forms but dent psyches. Affecting hundreds and thousands. Some amongst us are not sitting as mere spectators. Perhaps, they have been seeing and sensing these build-ups for far too long and have begun to question and (…)

While the UPA Government’s Congress leadership, notably PM Manmohan Singh, remains firm on going ahead with his reforms agenda unveiled on September 14 with the decision to allow 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail, the Congress-NCP ruling coalition in Maharashtra has suffered a jolt with Deputy CM and senior NCP leader Ajit Pawar’s dramatic resignation on September 25. This has doubtless put State CM Prithviraj Chavan (who has all along stood out for his honesty, integrity and probity in (…)

Intense and motivated propaganda, powerful national and international diplomatic pressure, verging on pure and simple arms-twisting of the kind the Third World has been facing for decades by means of the active role of the econo-mic hit-men in the policy establishments, huge cash-back lobbying, both in India and abroad, blunt attempts to bamboozle the persons holding key positions in India’s policy establishment through a combination of hissing and kissing have been deployed to make India (…)