2013

Politics in India may not be the same again. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has changed the agenda. It has introduced pure commu-nalism to the soft Hindutva that prevailed so far. By appointing the hardliner Narendra Modi, the Gujarat Chief Minister, as the campaign panel chief for the 2014 parliament election, the party has dropped every bit of ambiguity over secularism. It is stark Hinduism for all to see.
Apparently, the old leadership resisted the decision. Tall L.K. Advani had even (…)

by Anil Chamadia
The media is looking for money in news. And in the process, it has shed its veneer of being a source of information about what is happening around us. Rather, the media has been indulging in dispersal of ‘propaganda packaged as news’—an unethical practice which has come to be known as ’paid news’. Propagating an advertisement of a product/service after realising money through the media along with dispersal of news has been its revenue-earning model ever since the news (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
It is but natural for us to view the recent General Elections in Pakistan by our time-worn standards and to assess whether it could be regarded as free and fair. There were certainly inadequacies, some of them serious—particularly the prelude to it which involved peremptory dismissal of a duly elected government followed by appointment of a caretaker government chosen by the President and a snap election in the midst of the Muslim month of Ramzan fasting. But any major (…)

Recently Dr Henry Kissinger, the US National Security Adviser under President Richard Nixon, turned 90. On this occasion the author, a well-known diplomat and writer, assesses the role that Kissinger played vis-a-vis India in the seventies of the last century.
Anyone who worked as a diplomat in the latter half of the 20th century would have his private story to tell regarding Henry Kissinger.
So let me begin with mine, circa February 1972 in a cavernous room of the Union Public Services (…)

by V.P. Jain
Teachers and students in Delhi University are fiercely engaged in a wide-ranging debate over the rationale of the proposed four-year under-graduate course, to be introduced from the next academic session. The decision has ignited an intense national controversy by bringing the debate into the public sphere. Many teachers are vehemently opposed to the four year undergraduate programme (FYUP), charging the VC that the university has been brought to such a pass by the very (…)

by Satish Deshpande and Apoorvanand
Now that it is difficult to insist (as decision- makers in the print media did until recently) that the Delhi University’s controversial four- year undergraduate programme (FYUP) is a local matter unworthy of national attention, it is time to reiterate the reasons why it does merit such attention. The shortest and perhaps most effective method of outlining the larger implications of the DU-FYUP is to highlight the sheer improbability of what is actually (…)

by Vijender Sharma
The University of Delhi (DU) is currently on ventilator and, going by what we see as students, researchers, teachers, parents and citizens of this country, it is going to die quite soon. It is not likely to be the way Nalanda or Takshila died. It is dying because of the supporters of American imperialism like the Prime Minister, HRD Ministers, leaders of the Planning Commission and their lackeys, bureaucrats and, no less because of the Delhi University administration (…)

The last few issues of Mainstream (March 16, 2013, April 6, 2013, April 20, 2013) have been carrying on an interesting and fruitful debate on working class consciousness, torn by the dialectics of the economic and the politico-ideological aspects. I really enjoyed reading the debate between the well-known academicians, Prabhat Patnaik and Paresh Chattopadhyaya, and decided to make my own humble contribution.
Paresh Chattopadhyaya has rightly under-lined one crucial point, and that is very (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Deepshikha Kumari
Global Times and Federal Concerns: Insights from Indian and American Case by Amna Mirza; price: Rs 400; pages 200, hard bound; publisher: VL Media Solutions, New Delhi.
Dr Amna Mirza’s book titled Global Times and Federal Concerns is an insightful work on a very relevant issue of the present times. The relationship between the ‘national’ and ‘inter-national’ and notions of ‘government’ and ‘gover-nance’ has been an ongoing debate in political science (…)

While the IPL spot-fixing and betting scams continue to plague the cricket scene with the exposure of more figures in the extravaganza (witness Rajasthan Royals co-owner Raj Kundra’s predicament following his alleged confession to the police of betting that resulted in his suspension by the BCCI), fast-moving political developments have lately cast their long shadow over the future of the BJP and the NDA it leads.
As was forecast in these columns last week—that the outcome of the last (…)