2013

TRIBUTE
by Rajeev Dhavan
No obituary notice can do justice to Justice J.S. Verma. A judge for over 25 years, Chief Justice of India (CJI), Chairman, National Human Rights Commission, (NHRC), Verma Commission on Security Lapses, Verma Commission on Rape Laws. The list is endless. Many judges hanker for post-retirement jobs, Justice Verma did not. A CJI has to chair the NHRC. He did not ask for the job, but did a good job. He earned no money from post-retirement practice or arbitrations. (…)

The spat between the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the new tranche of WikiLeaks, alleging former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to have negotiated for the Swedish jet, is understandable when the country is on the brink of general elections. According to the latest bunch of US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, Rajiv Gandhi may have been a middleman for the Swedish company, Saab-Scania, when it was trying to sell its Viggen fighter aircraft to India in the seventies. (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
It is surprising how intelligent people in politics sometimes take up positions which should logically belong to their adversaries.
The Muslim League in 1940 picked up the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ which a bunch of extremist intellectuals had first coined to back up their demand for Pakistan. Other parties in India rejected it. The Congress made it clear that it did not accept the theory itself though it agreed to the partitioning of the country on the basis of (…)

Farmers bodies are gearing up to oppose the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011, which was supposedly amended to improve compensation to farmers under directions from Congress party President Sonia Gandhi and Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, as the new draft perverts the meaning of “public purpose” to benefit multinationals and facilitate creation of special economic zones for private industry.
The Bill, reportedly cleared by an all-party meeting on April 18, as a (…)

by Arun Srivastava
From funding the elections to choosing the prime ministerial candidate, the corporate sector has acquired enormous political power and has, in the process, emerged as the sole determinant factor of the destiny of India. Never before in the 66 years of independent India had any prime ministerial candidate to walk on the ramps of the corporate houses as recently Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi had to do at the FICCI and CII meets on the plea of elucidating their views and (…)

DOCUMENT
Fact-Finding Report on the Situation in the Wake of Bomb Blast in Jagatsinghpur District, Odisha
Executive Summary
On March 9, 2013, a 12-member team consisting of human rights activists, journalists, academicians, democratic rights and civil liberty activists, conducted a fact-finding visit to the Patana and Gobindapur villages of the Dhinkia Panchayat in the Jagatsinghpur district of Odisha. On March 2, 2013, a bomb blast took place in the Patana village and three people (…)

COMMUNICATION
This is in response to the article published in Mainstream on March 16, 2013, "Patriarchy and the Rise of Sexual Assaults in India: An Explanation" by Dr Gilbert Sebastian.
Violence against women is a fact of life in India, as indeed in most parts of the world. As Dr Sebastian rightly points out, from female foeticide to infanticide, from domestic violence to molestation to sexual assault, females are neither safe unborn or born, inside the home or out of it. Undoubtedly a (…)

by Tridivesh Singh Maini and Usman Shahid
The following article has been sent to us by Usman Shahid, a Pakistani national, from Lahore. He and Tridivesh Singh Maini (who is an Indian) have recently co-authored a book on Indo-Pak people-to-people contact to be published soon.
The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline turned out to be the swan song of the Zardari Government as the President formally inaugurated the so- called peace pipeline project worth $ 7.5 billion with his Iranian counterpart on (…)

Noted writer Pankaj Mishra wrote the following piece that appeared in The New Republic (December 21, 2012) from where it is being reproduced, with due acknowledgement, alongwith a response from retired IFS officer Saurabh Kumar for the benefit of our readers.
by Pankaj Mishra
China is shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade (…)

The article brings to bear the writer’s formidable skills for broad-brush painting of the contemporary scene with a keen eye on history to give us some valuable insights about the commonalities in the current travails of the two “rising” Asian powers that had set out on lofty historical missions more or less together, albeit with contrasting political systems—the “profound crisis of legitimacy” confronting them both, above all.
Attributing the “growing resemblance” to the state in India (…)