2013

The beauty of Pakistan’s fledgling democracy, reinforced by last month’s election, is that no Army General who seized power has returned to it after quitting.
Pervez Musharraf’s attempt is now part of the ‘if’ and ‘buts’ of politics since it ended in his detention and a likely return to exile.
But a politician has repeatedly done so. Benazir Bhutto did two terms and Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif started his third this week, a good decade-plus after he was removed by Musharraf.
Saying this (…)

The following are some thoughts penned by the author on the World Environment Day which was observed on June 5.
India’s national Capital city and some other mega cities are now going through a tremendous heat wave, which have few parallels in these cities’ history. Amid this horrid indicator that a catastrophic climate change has indeed been taking place, the country observed the Environment Day by passively resolving to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been (…)

Those of us who grew up generally within the intellectual and political culture of the Left soon learnt to have a very different meaning for the acronym IPS than Indian Police Service. More troublesomely, it meant Inner-Party Struggle.
Such struggles within Left organisations, we soon discovered, issued usually from highly committed immersions in elaborate analytic readings into texts and histories, skirting mere personalities or events as objects of study in favour of the large current of (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
BJP’s Dangerous Politics
One of my earliest reporting experiences was the great Calcutta killing of 1946. Fierce communal passions were unleashed and thousands were done to death on both sides in the course of a couple of days. But behind that gory carnage was the fight for the city of Calcutta: who should get it? Pakistan or India? Religious beliefs are made use of to rouse mass anger among innocent people, but those who whip up such passions do so only for (…)

Not many people in the world, and specially Christians in India, will recognise Phalgun Amawasya, Kaliyug Varsha 5114 as April 10, 2013. But it is an important date to remember. That was the date that in the well-known Samant-wadi, a pretty place near the southern tip of the State of Maharashtra, saw a meeting of what they described as “devout” Hindus. Samant-wadi, a former principality under the Bhonsales, is known for its Brahminic traditions. But what was unusual about this meeting was a (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Prepare to lose not only our mountain-protected west coast but also the Andamans. Not because of terrorists or China, but because the greed of our politicians and business lobbies will make them go under the sea. So reckless is
the exploitation of these regions that we can already see signs of the ultimate catastrophe taking shape.
The Western Ghats is the water source of the south, the Himalayas of the south. If there are no Himalayas, there will be no Ganga, and if there (…)

If there ever was a colonial legacy it is cricket. But as with most other inheritances of loss, the English gentleman’s game has moved on from the initiation of the Indian counterpart to the creativity of the “player” and “professional”, well beyond the cricket field. Anyone with a passion for the game has a sense of what will transpire in the middle. But those whose fervour stems from more visceral foundations are translating their zeal into the fulfilment of their deepest inner urges. The (…)

When revolutions are in quest for freedom and justice even after four decades of their happening, it means that they have gone awry. If hartals and demonstrations are staged with the same frequency, the scenario becomes all the more sombre. This is what has taken place in Bangladesh.
Kamal Hossain, the country’s first Foreign Minister, has written a book to give an account of it. I wish he had said more about the birth of Bangladesh and the failure to sustain the spirit of secular (…)

Now that the cat is out of the bag and finally the Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) is being criticised and thereby being discussed by some of the leading scholars of the country, one needs to also think of its relationship with the current state of democracy in India. The manner in which the FYUP is being pushed through in the Delhi University crushes the very idea of a university and with it the ideals and ideas of democracy.
Even if one assumes and believes that the Academic (…)

by Manoj Kumar
Come July, and unless something extra-ordinary takes place, the University of Delhi is going to begin to implement its brand new Four Year Undergraduate Programme for the students who join the university this year. This, the university administration hopes, would also bring to an end an acrimonious opposition to the new course that has accompanied its formalisation. There is a general consensus, both among the proponents and opponents of the new course, that this is a (…)