2013

The recent outbursts of communal violence in Kishtwar, a remote town in Jammu and Kashmir, amply bear out the pathologies of our modernity. Rekha Chowdhary’s reading of the genesis of the town (The Hindu, August 17, 2013) and other media reports make our point evident.
Kishtwar was known for its near idyllic inter-community relations till two decades back. The town represented an exemplary situation in 1947 when conscious collective efforts were made by the elders of both the Hindu and (…)

by Suranjita Ray
A Historic Initiative
The National Food Security Bill (NFSB), 2013, passed after a long debate in the Lok Sabha, and after a longer wait, is indeed a historic initiative to make the state responsible to ensure food security to 67 per cent of its population. Providing the citizens legal entitlement to food is a positive intervention of the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government, which has privileged the rights-based approach that has guaranteed a series of (…)

The Select Committee Report on the Wakf (Amendment) Bill, 2010 along with a draft law has been circulated. An Amendment Bill, one presumes, shall now be placed by the government before the Rajya Sabha and then it will go to the Lok Sabha. The Select Committee Report has led to much controversy, particularly on the alienation of Wakf property.
Going through the history of Wakf Acts from 1954 to 1995, the present form of the Wakf Act was perhaps inevitable, as designed to protect the Wakf (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
The concluding functions that brought the curtain down on the year-long celebrations of the golden jubilee of the ‘Quit India’ struggle of 1942, presented in sharp relief the slump in morale allround.
With all the exposures of mega corruption in which the wielders of power have been entangled, and the unashamed buying of MPs so that the reins of the government do not slip out of one’s hand—all the homilies and harangues at the August 9 celebrations sounded so hollow (…)

by Madhusudan Bandi
Experts are yet to reach consensus on the continued poverty of the natural resource users. However, it appears that the social systems from which they arise are structured so unequally that it justifies the Marxist view of environmental problems reflecting ‘unequal distribution of resources’ eluding a lasting solution. (Sachs, 1993) Even the so-called developed States in India could not extend the spoils of growth to this section of the population, indicating their (…)

by Alok Bajpai
“It is unjust to a writer to quote against him passages from his writings without reference to the context.”1
Here at the very outset I wish to state my vantage point about Hind Swaraj. It was not written by Gandhi as an independent philosophic text. He was a prolific writer. He wrote and spoke always with a context and according to the demands of the situation as he perceived them. All his writings have inevitable contexts and tearing any of them apart from their (…)

The parched earth fissured; the solitary mynah with its open beak looked sky-ward. There was no cloud in sight, the sun shone relentlessly on and on as we prayed for some rain to relieve this blighted pain.
Yet you seemed to derive pleasure in denying us. You mocked us with your hands on your hips, a twisted smile on your lips. While we talked of global warming and climate change you switched on the air-conditioning, blocking out the news of the valley that was being exchanged.
Forty (…)

Kerala has for long been the sick State of India, politics for the sake of politics dominating all of life, traditional strengths ebbing away and new strengths finding no avenues to develop. It is a State where the moment is mistaken for eternity. Last week the mother of all street protests created records even by Kerala’s standards. The capital city of Trivandrum overflowed with crowds such as it had never seen before. They were responding to the Left parties’ call to lay siege to the (…)

by T.R. Choudhury
As the situation in and around Syria worsens, the possibility of the US’ armed intervention in that country is looming large on the horizon. Washington is backed fully by the British Government of David Cameron on this issue but the latter has lost a crucial vote in the British Parliament and has thus conceded that a majority of Britons do not want to see British participation in the proposed Western intervention in Syria, something he has promised to respect. As for the (…)

We are approaching yet another Independence Day in three days time—our sixtyseventh. Once again the Prime Minister will deliver his Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort in the morning of August 15 giving an account of our achievements and our failures, our strengths and our weaknesses against the backdrop of developments across the nation and the world at large and outlining the roadmap for the future.
For several years now this has been a routine affair, a (…)