2013

It makes news when Maoists kill members of the political class. The news of the killing of 28 leaders in Chattiagarh’s Jagdalpur district by 300 Maoists spread across the country in no time and the country was electrified. There was shock and disgust at the killings. The Pradesh Congress Committee chief, Nand Kumar Patel, and his son—Dinesh—were dragged to the dense bushes and shot in their head while senior Congress leader V.C. Shukla remained unattended for quite sometimes before he was (…)

MUSINGS
What are we going all over looking for solutions to try settling the anger of the tribal population, when one Minister in the Central Government (GOI) has come forth with an elaborate backgrounder? Before I write any further just this one-liner: you could call this tribal anger by any other term of your choice; call it Naxal terror but the fact remains that it is the anger of the tribal-cum-village-cum-rural population against the political-cum-adminis-trative rulers of the day. (…)

The Indian state characterised the Maoist insurgency as the biggest internal security problem for the country. The spectre of Maoism has returned to haunt the state in the wake of the brutal killing of a number of top Congress leaders in Chhattisgarh including the founder of anti-Maoist forces, Mahendra Karma, by the Maoists.
Mahendra Karma, who represented Bastar in the Lok Sabha and Dantewada in the State Assembly, founded two anti-Maoist forces in Chhattisgarh: Jan Jagaran Abhiyan in (…)

by Tridivesh Singh Maini and Arko Dasgupta
Both the main political outfits of Tamil Nadu, the ruling AIADMK and Opposition DMK, recently competed with each other in taking a belligerent stand vis-à-vis Sri Lanka.
While the latter pulled out of the UPA coalition, because it felt New Delhi had approved a watered-down UN resolution to look into alleged war crimes by the Sri Lankan Army during their campaign against the LTTE in 2009, the ruling party was not to be left far behind with Chief (…)

The Government of India designed and launched the Sethusamudram shipping channel project in 2005 for which Rs 25,000 crores was the expenditure estimated then. Now ships from the Abrabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal have to circumnavigate Sri Lanka because between Dhanushkodi of Tamil Nadu and Thalaimannar of Sri Lanka there is a shallow sea along with soil formations like broken bund. If a deep waterway is made by dredging out 83 kms there, ships from the Cape Comorin side to Kolkata and (…)

The country’s cricket scene has turned murkier than what it was presumed to be when the IPL spot-fixing scandal first hit the headlines.
The clean-up operation in the BCCI turned out to be a sham: at the organisation’s emergency Working Committee meeting at Chennai on June 2 the prior resignations of two leading BCCI Board members—Sanjay Jagdale and Ajay Shirke (its Treasurer)—and that of IPL Commissioner Rajeev Shukla had virtually no impact on BCCI President N. Srinivasan who refused to (…)

TRIBUTE
Vinadi (Dr Mrs Vina Mazumdar) passed away in the wee-hours of May 30, 2013. There were other illustrious leaders of the Indian feminist movement prior to Vinadi but the singular contribution of Vinadi was to ensure political empowerment of women in India.
Daughter of one of the pioneer hydrological engineers of India, Vinadi was a born rebel. One of her personal habits—like chain-smoking in her prime age—was not so much addiction to tobacco as a sign of defiance of the (…)

Vina Mazumdar, who passed away at the age of 86 last week, sensitised a whole generation of women about their rights and roles in the 1970s and 1980s—and nudged many like me to question long accepted assumptions about ourselves. She, and her comrade-in-arms, lawyer Lotika Sarkar, as also Jai Chandiram, one of the pioneers of Doordarshan when it was set up—both of them also passed away recently—can truly be called independent India’s nation-builders.
I remember how often we, who were (…)

My liberal friends tell me to understand the Naxalites, not to condemn them. I wish I could follow their advice. But how do I reconcile the difference between the Nexalites, who killed this week some 25 Congress leaders at Chhattisgarh, and the two Nigerians, who beheaded a British soldier a few days ago at London in public? For me, both are terrorists, fundamentalists, the first from the Left and the other from the Right. And does ideology mean anything when the brutalities of one are no (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
This article was written by N.C. fortythree years ago as ‘Observer’ in Mainstream (May 2, 1970) during the first wave of the Naxalite movement.
The spate of terrorist violence in West Bengal has pin-pointed public attention on what has come to be known as the Naxalite problem. Many so-called specialists on communism have aired very profound views on the nature of this phenomenon and have not hesitated to deliver homilies on how to deal with it.
The Union Home (…)