2013

In the penultimate year of nearly one-decade rule by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, I find the biggest casualty is the people’s confidence in political parties, particularly the ruling Congress. In fact, the public is so exasperated that it has come to believe that dishonesty and politics are synonymous and those who have come to politics have done so only to make money.
I was aghast to find that many well-placed people have not contributed to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund (…)

COMMUNICATION
Recently there has been a very severe disaster in the State of UttaraKhand in the northern part of India. This region had been in controversy for over a decade due to the construction of several dams on the Ganga river and its various upland tributaries in the Himalayan region.
These numerous small and big dams were constructed with great hurry but without proper hydrological, geological, hydraulics-related investigations including geological mappings and expected (…)

by Pratip Chattopadhyay
I
The politics of the Trinamul Congress has always been a continued search for alternates —be it in leadership style, be it in managing the sentiments of the masses or be it in creating new promises in governance. However alter-nates never arise from a scratch—alternates are some additions upon the previous experiences —and hence one can always find a resonance of the CPI-M brand in some of the slogans of the TMC [amra kara?—”Trinamul”, jachhe kara? “Trinamul” (…)

Within a few months of her coming to power in 2011, a section of the media—print as well as electronic—started a campaign against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, trying to belittle whatever she was doing and show her in a bad light. Mamata’s temperament made their task easy. She is easily provoked. Her responses are quite often knee-jerk, her comments brusque and off-the-cuff. This lands her frequently in avoidable controversy like her dismissing last year’s incident of a rape in Park Street (…)

by Arko Dasgupta
With the Indian voter eagerly anticipating next year’s general elections for the 16th Lok Sabha, the talk of the town seems to be the viability of a Third Front—a coalition of non-Indian National Congress and non-Bharatiya Janata Party led-parties—to challenge the electoral dominance of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, to set up shop in Parliament. Details are sketchy but as of this moment the composition of this (…)

TRIBUTE
The ‘culture’ of a Mysorean has been captured through the writings of R. K. Narayan. However, for those who migrated to Delhi from Mysore, it was a subject we often went back to noting our uniqueness with a sense of contentment if not quiet pride. We cherished the fact that we were a rather laid-back people, with local concerns and great tolerance. Often seen as dull for not rising up like our neighbours, the Tamils or the Malayalis, living somewhat sedately, homebodies, seemingly (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Ayodhya: The Dark Night, The Secret History of Rama’s Appearance in Babri Masjid by Krishna Jha and Dhiren K. Jha; Harper Collins; 2012; pp. 193; price: Rs 499.
This extraordinary research work unravels the key missing link in the Ayodhya conspiracy that deliberately and artificially created the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi controversy to communalise Indian politics to pave the path to power for communal-fascism, with the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha as the main culprits behind (…)

IMPRESSIONS
In a surrealistic way, the rupee’s fall to record lows reflects India’s fall in prestige to record lows.... O! What a fall is there, my countrymen; then I, and you, and all of us fall down, whilst bloody shamelessness flourish over us.... At home unclean men get clean chits. Abroad America and Europe, China and even Pakistan slap us around, and we turn the other cheek. We have become a country that can be taken for granted. We just don’t count.
In other countries Prime (…)

Even though as many as 769 villages still remain cut off with restoration of road connectivity that had been severely affected by the landslides during the disaster and telecommunication cables snapped by the calamity nowhere in sight, the Uttarakhand tragedy, overtaken by several other developments, notably the terror strike at Bodhgaya, has been relegated into the background as was only to be expected. However, more than three weeks after flash floods and landslides wreaked havoc in the (…)

by Krishnakumar S.
In the background of the falling rupee, there has been a series of articles in the financial press by economists and policy-advisers of the neoliberal persuasion, making a strong case for a further dose of liberalisation. Even while institutions and policy-making centres in the developed world have abandoned the palliatives based on the Washington Consensus, one is at a loss to understand as to why the Indian liberals still continue to have infinite faith in the capacity (…)