2013

Who will be India’s PM after the 2014 general elections? This is a question being hotly debated in the print and electronic media. It is taken for granted that the incumbent Prime Minister, who has held the position for two consecutive terms (five years each), will not be the candidate. Two names are being prominently mentioned on behalf of the two major national parties—Rahul Gandhi as the Congress party candidate and Narendra Modi as the BJP candidate. Both the parties have yet to formally (…)

This piece was sent sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
by Gazala Peer
When the seven-day siege of Kashmir was over, I decided to pay a visit to Sopore to the family of Afzal Guru who was murdered on February 9, 2013 in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. As I stepped out there were rimours all around that Afzal Guru’s house is cordoned, his body will be returned anytime and nobody is allowed to visit the greiving family for the past one week since he was killed. I (…)

What was widely anticipated has now been confirmed. The Sri Lankan Government reaffirmed on April 9 that it does not concur with the US-sponsored resolution adopted at the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva on March 22 and that the government, therefore, will not hold talks with anyone on the related matters.
The government has also rejected the report of the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Nina Pillai, which forms the basis of the hearings of the UNHRC session on the alleged human (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya; Penguin Viking, India; 2011; Rs 499.
A realistically insightful volume sheds light on the process by which ideas percolate a culture and arguably create their own fusion. The scholarly antecedents of the author, with a professional eye on documentation, are bonuses. The historian’s facility reaches out to connect fragments of events and the human condition across the country and the world in Rabindranath (…)

COMMUNICATION
I approached with eagerness the rejoinder of Prabhat Patnaik (PP) in Mainstream no. 16 of April 6, 2013. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. He basically avoided the subject matter of my paper, namely, how the working classs gains revolutionary consciousness. He only highlighted what was really a side issue added by me at the end of the article, which really did not have any necessary relation with the main thrust of the paper. In that article towards the end I (…)

The report card on the creditable performance of her governent in several respects that the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, presented to the Planning Commission during her discussions about the Plan allocation for West Bengal for 2013-14 has been totally ignored by the media for reasons best known to it.
Even Rajiv Shukla, the Union Minister of State for Planning, and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, were appreciative of the performance. (…)

April 22 this year marks V.I. Lenin’s 143rd birth anniversary. On this occasion we are carrying the following piece by a well-known Marxist ideologue and senior CPI leader.
It was way back in 1922 that Lenin advanced the concept of new international economic order (NIEO). That was in the context of the Genoa conference of European nations, where a reordering and reconstruction of the post-First World War Europe was to be discussed, basically in the economic field. It was also in this (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
Introduction
Is sexuality a stigmatised knowledge? Is it ego’s freedom? Sigmund Freud characterised it as melancholia or inability to grieve or as narcissistic disorder. There is a individual quest for instinctual freedom but civilisation demands conformity and instinctual repression. Here, sexuality represents a false mastery of an egoistic psychology in which the conspiracy is that consciousness has not adequately distinguished itself from the environment. The melancholia (…)

by Tamanna Khosla
Women have always had a strong stake in democracy. Democracy requires that citizens’ interests be heard, deliberated and legislated on. Women are half of the world’s population, and as such their voice should be heard in the democratic process. Democracy needs women in order to be truly democratic, and women need democracy if they are to change the systems and laws that preclude them, and preclude societies as a whole, from attaining equality.
But the crimes against (…)

The system of untouchability has been a goldmine for the Hindus. This system affords 60 millions of untouchables to do the dirty work of scavenging and sweeping to the 240 million Hindus who are debarred by their religion to do such dirty work. But the work must be done for the Hindus and who else than the untouchables? —Dr B.R. Ambedkar
Can shit collection or cleaning of gutters—which has condemned lakhs of people to a life of indignity since ages—be considered a ‘Spiritual Experience’? (…)