2013

by Sambaiah Gundimeda
The Congress party has enjoyed stable support in Andhra Pradesh during the 2004 and 2009 elections, thanks mainly to the Machiavellian electoral strategies and politics of the former Chief Minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR). But after YSR’s disastrous death in a helicopter crash in September 2009, both the Congress party and the State of Andhra Pradesh have been embroiled in crisis after crisis. Two factors that are at the centre of these crises are Telangana and (…)

Multiple blasts on July 7, 2013 in the Mahabodhi Temple, Bodhgaya, Bihar, which is the holiest shrine of the Buddhists and a UNESCO world heritage site, point the finger at the callousness in the security and sanctity of so sacred a pilgrimage centre. The blasts have rightly invited attention of people across the globe in general and Buddhists in particular. The place where Gautam Buddha had attained his enlightenment is visited by tens of thousands of devotees and tourists from home and (…)

The declaimed prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party seems distinctly apprehensive, and therefore angry.
As his political persona marches fast forward, albeit with contradictions and hiccups—the latest one being the declaration that he would like to see toilets built before temples, a sentiment first expressed by Jairam Ramesh of the Congress party, only then to be bashed by the Hindutva brigade, who now can find only good things to say when Modi says the same thing, (…)

COMMUNICATION
According to some newspapers reports, Yadvendra Singh Sandhu, a distant relative of the great martyr of the Indian freedom struggle, Bhagat Singh (hanged on March 23, 1931 along with Sukhdev and Rajguru in Lahore) has invited Hindutva icon Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister, who calls himself ‘Hindu nationalist’ and a member of the RSS, to release Shahid Bhagat Singh’s Jail Diary in Delhi. The same relative had announced a high-priced coffee-table book edition of this (…)

COMMUNICATION
Nabanipa Bhattacharjee’s well-written article titled “Negotiating Marginality: The Bangla-Speakers of Assam” (Mainstream, August 9-15) does not discuss one aspect of the question, namely, the need for closer interaction between the Assamese and Bengali litterateurs of Assam. As I was born at Silchar in the Bengali-speaking Barak Valley, in my younger days I was closely associated with the movement for recognition of Bengali as a State language in Assam. My father, Nagendra (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
by Archana Ranka
I. Privacy Rights
The procreational right of privacy must extend its constitutional protection to non-traditional family units and alternative methods of reproduction.1 For example, legislation prohibiting artificial insemination or other reproductive techniques to unmarried women would violate fundamental freedoms. “The Constitution prevents government from standardising its children and its adults—by forcing all to live in certain narrowly defined (…)

by Shahnawaz Ahmad Mantoo
Justice continues to elude the present-day world as there are still exploitations, conflicts and miseries inflicted on the Third World states by the colonisers or neo-colonisers. Colonialism or imperialism is still there but in a new shape and form. The terminology hardly matters because what is important to mention here is that exploitation in the form of imperialism or colonialism was in the colonial era and its contemporary form happens to be neo-colonialism. (…)

The RSS specialises in double-speak and triple- speak. In fact, the situation is so critical that it may be an understatement regarding the RSS behaviour. No other organisation which claims to be committed to moral regeneration of India can compete with the RSS in manufacturing lies. The current public manifestations of the RSS for active participation in Indian politics, especially forcing the BJP to project Narendra Modi as the prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 elections, is a (…)

The conventional understanding of parliamentary democracy is that there will be a ruling party (or coalition) and there will be an opposition side.
However, given the experience of recent years, a time has come to explore whether a national unity government, which provides at least some presence to even Opposition parties, is possible. Such a national unity government will have representatives of almost all the political parties whose members are elected to Parliament.
Here two aspects (…)

Narendra Modi could not have imagined that his exhortation—‘toilets first, temples later’ —at a Delhi conclave would not only generate a debate within the saffron fraternity but would also bring back the focus on the pathetic situation of sanitation in his home State itself. And the ensuing discussion would also transcend to his controversial ideas about untouchability—the social-religious practice based on the logic of purity and pollution which has marginalised, terrorised and relegated a (…)