2013

IMPRESSIONS
The Allahabad High Court recently banned caste-based public rallies, a core political gimmick in Uttar Pradesh. Within days the UP Public Service Commission announced a new reservation policy with caste-based quotas from the preliminary examination stage itself. This violated the spirit of not only the High Court’s order against caste rallies but also of the Supreme Court’s order capping reservation at 50 per cent.
There was public commotion, some students took recourse to (…)

DOCUMENT
The following are excerpts from a Report by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association on the conviction of Shahzad Ahmad over the Batla House ‘encounter’ in which Inspector M.C. Sharma was fatally injured and subsequently breathed his last. The report was released to the press in New Delhi on July 31, 2013.
The site map of L-18, Batla House, where an ‘encounter’ resulted in the death of Inspector M.C. Sharma and two young men, Atif Ameen and Md. Sajid. Flat Number 108, where (…)

The gulf between the politician and the common citizen, the aam aadmi, is widening by the day. One is getting proof of that almost on a daily basis. But what two spokespersons of the Congress, the party leading the ruling coalition at the Centre, claimed in the last two days magnified that alienation of the leading figures in the ruling party from the ordinary people despite the fact that the former never tire themselves of asserting that they articulate the aspirations of the latter. (…)

by Pannalal Surana
The Finance Minister and his officers have become panicky. There has been persistent withdrawal of bond money. The reasons seem to be two-fold. The rupee is falling. So earlier the withdrawal, lesser the loss. Secondly, multi-national companies need more liquidity in the American market because the Federal Reserve (Central bank of the USA) is rolling back the policy of advancing stimulant money initiated in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. The announcement was made (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Only figuratively do legislatures represent the people; in real terms they represent the political class. When a legislature passes an irresponsible law, the political class as a whole stands condemned. This is patently so when laws are passed to protect criminals in the House. Such transgressions have been going on for a while, enabling murderers and rapists to function as law-makers and as Cabinet Ministers. Democracy was shamed in the process and India disgraced before the (…)

by Ritesh Dwivedi
The National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) was launched as a Centrally sponsored scheme on August 15, 1995, initially in 2408 blocks of the country. Today the NP-NSPE is the largest feeding programme covering about 12 crore children in over 9.50 lakh schools across the country. Barring a few, all States are providing 3 kg of wheat/rice per child per month. It was only after the directives of the Supreme Court that cooked Mid-Day Meal (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
July 27 marks the legendary freedom fighter, Kalpana Dutt’s birth centenary. On this occasion we remember her and offer our sincere tribute to her abiding memory by reproducing the following piece N.C. wrote in her honour eighteen years ago in February 1995 following her demise on February 8 that year.
On February 8 passed away in a Calcutta hospital a frail figure who sixty years ago became a legend in the classical mould. Kalpana Dutt, born in 1913 in a (…)

It is an open secret that the Army in Pakistan is a peg or two higher than the civilian apparatus. But I saw chinks in its armoury when a commission report was leaked. That the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) could be “a collaborator” in hiding Osama bin Laden, the Taliban’s inspiration, was an insinuation which I thought the Army would not pocket without demur. But that happened.
I was, however, reading too much into the leakage. Within a few days, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif went to (…)

Come to think of it, imagine how many great souls have been done in by their eventual failure to balance within them the claims of nature and culture.
Narendra Modi is clearly the latest, and perhaps the most dangerously acute, instance of the conundrum.
Events since 2002 are proof that what comes naturally to Modi is to fight his smallness of mind, wrapped in outsized ambition, by donning a self-regarding “burqa” of paranoia, constructing enemies on a sustained basis, using what (…)

by T. Sadashivam
The issue of Development versus Environment has again come in the public discourse because of the Uttarakhand tragedy. Although the debate over development versus environment has been there since the past many decades, what added a new dimension to it was a term called ‘Climate Change’. According to the World Bank, a ‘climate change is a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, a change that alters the composition of the global (…)