2012

From economic slowdown and failed monsoon to the spread of violence and unabated communal passions (see Assam), the challenges facing India have assumed critical proportions. But all we get from the leaders of our country are personal manoeuvres for power and position. Two examples of this surfaced last week. Repeated appeals by Congress careerists finally elicited a gracious nod from Rahul Gandhi for ”assuming bigger responsibilities”. Sharad Pawar threw tantrums as part of a game to stop (…)

The President in India is only a constitutional head. He or she draws his/her authority from the elected Parliament and State Assemblies. Yet the office became a point of contest because both the Congress and BJP, the two main political parties, wanted to test the waters before the 2014 general elections.
The Congress has proved that its support, including that of its allies, is intact. Its candidate, Pranab Mukherjee, the former Finance Minister, has become India’s 13th President. The BJP (…)

by Kanwal Sibal
The position India is taking on the unfolding Syrian crisis does not do honour to our diplomacy.
Last week, we supported the Western resolution providing for sanctions on Syria under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, unless its government effectively ended its military operations against the insurgents, who are backed by the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Russia and China vetoed this one-sided resolution which imposed specific and verifiable obligations on the (…)

The ascendancy of Wahhabism in West Asia will pose a serious threat to India’s social harmony and national security as time passes.
The Jerusalem Post newspaper recently featured an illuminating piece on the growing threat of Wahhabism in India. We in India often speak propagandistically about the threat of a ‘Talibanised’ Pakistan to our country, overlooking that Pakistan is not an aberration in the region. The spectre that haunts Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (and Central Asia) alike (…)

It is a truism, though painful, that the Central Government’s priorities in fiscal matters are determined by the perceived sensitivities of the foreign and Indian corporate sector and the richer class rather than the urgent and humanitarian considerations for the poor and old citizens of India. How I wish that instead the government was to show urgent attention to the plight of about 10 crore elderly people (eight per cent of the Indian population, with one-sixth of them living without any (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Twentyfive years ago, on July 29, 1987, the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement came into force. This Agreement, signed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Junius Richard Jayawardene, was aimed at restoring peace in Sri Lanka, ameliorating the condition of Tamils there and bringing about a lasting solution to the ethnic problem in the island-state. However, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), sent to Sri Lanka soon after the signing of the Agreement, (…)

by Ather Farouqui
I would like to take this opportunity of congratulating Nusrat Zaheer on his excellent views on various aspects of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in Mainstream (vol. L, no. 11, March 3, 2012) and Abdul W. Qasmi in ‘Whither National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language’ in Mainstream (vol. L, no. 19, April 28, 2012)
Though Zaheer has commented on the PWA, his letter seems to have gone unnoticed in the CPI and CPI-M. This is owing largely to their well-known (…)

by Naresh Nadeem
The first half of the twentieth century holds a unique place in the history of mankind. On the international plane, this was the period when the old-style colonialism entered the phase of imperialism. John Atkinson Hobson published his book Imperialism in 1902, and Lenin offered a cogent explanation of this phenomenon one-and-a-half decades later, showing that the interests of various colonial powers of Europe were mutually clashing so acutely that there was no scope of (…)

There has been spiralling rise in foodgrain prices accompanied with food shortages in almost all the developing countries. There are billions of hungry people all over the world. There are many theses to explain and rationalise this haunting vision.
Robert Malthus propounded that population will grow till it outstrips food production, and then famines, wars and epidemics will intervene to restore the balance. Is the present or impending food crisis, the vindication of Malthus?
In 1950, (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Khrushchev Lied by Grover Furr; Erythros Press and Media, LLC, Kettering, Ohio, USA; 2011; pages 423.
One can understand praise for Josef Stalin’s positive contributions which in fact are many, no doubt, but one can’t digest open defence of not simply mistakes but of the organised repressions and physical eliminations by Stalin and his group in the course of the history of the USSR and CPSU. The book at hand is a whole hog justification of the most brutal arrests, tortures, (…)