2013

IMPRESSIONS
The following piece was written before Italy decided to send back the Marines to India to face trial here. But we are still publishing it as its contents broadly retain their relevance even now.
Italy is India’s made-for-each-other soulmate. The similarities between the two countries are amazing. Rome, like Mumbai, is home to gifted pickpockets. Italians, like Indians, are chaotic, break traffic rules with pride and always shout at the other fellow for bad driving. Cops (…)

by Hamid Hussain
The title of this article emanates from an NDTV India debate on March 16 on an identical title in which I participated. This being a serious foreign policy issue, it needed a greater degree of introspection and dissection in the print media. Misdirected economic measures of the UPA Government have led to the slowing down of economic growth, placing its GDP growth rate at merely five per cent—the lowest in the decade. A faulty agricultural policy has resulted in absolute (…)

Dhaka was a distant dot on India’s map when I was living in my home town, Sialkot. Partition pushed me to Delhi and, happily for me, the dot came closer. I took the first plane to Dhaka as soon as it became the capital of the liberated Bangladesh. For the first time, I heard Joi Bangla, a slogan or an invocation, from the weary Bengalis returning home. The airport was littered with luggage and looked disorderly with long queues before the immigration desks. Yet every face was writ with (…)

COMMUNICATION
This is with reference to Paresh Chattopadhyay’s (PC’s) response in the March 16 issue of Mainstream to my article “Leninism and Class Consciousness” (originally published in People’s Democracy, January 13, 2013). PC is entitled to his views on Lenin and Leninism, but at the end of his note he accuses me of speaking an untruth (bold in original) in an earlier article in The Telegraph, December 12, 2012, where I had said that the Bolsheviks had abolished the death penalty (…)

This article was written some days ago. There is thus here a reference to a demonstration in Kolkata “to be held on March 30”. However, its contents retain their validity till date. So it is being published now.
“Any death is regrettable and those who died due to police fire may also come under this category. What is interesting is the Jamaat’s modus operandi. The lone survivor of the December 14 mass murder of intellectuals described in a recent TV documentary how Al Badr killed Prof (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
The Seventh Non-Aligned Summit took place in New Delhi from March 7 to 12, 1983. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of that event we are carrying the following pieces of N.C. that appeared in Mainstream (March 19, 1983) after the conclusion of the Summit—the first as the ‘Editor’s Notebook’ and the other as a write-up in the same issue.
The river of History looks placid: only when the snows melt on the high mountains do floods break the banks and sweep away all the (…)

“The Conference is over. The concord must endure.” With these words, almost Biblical in their pithy simplicity, Indira Gandhi announced in Vigyan Bhavan on March 12 the end of the Seventh Summit of the Nonaligned countries. It was a moving moment, the new milepost in the long journey of millions upon millions from continents far and near, who have broken the fetters of colonial bondage and are striving for a better world to live in.
A star-studded conclave comprising the majority of (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Bishwajit Sen
Marxism and the Indian Left: From “Interpreting” India to “Changing” it by Sumanta Banerjee; Purbalok Publication, Kolkata; Price: Rs 400; First Published 2012.
History sometimes poses seemingly insoluble riddles to the observer. Decimation of the Marxist ideals is one such riddle. It seems to be just the other day when the glory of the Red Flag was all-pervasive. The Soviet Union was glowing and so was China to their own faithful. On the native turf, West (…)

In the winter session of Parliament, the Government of India introduced the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill on December 20, 2012 that would entitle the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe government employees for promotion in services. The Samajwadi Party, beforehand, had declared its anti-reservation stance. The Bill was earlier passed by the Rajya Sabha. When the Union Minister of State for Personnel and Administrative Reforms tried to introduce the Bill, Yashvir Singh, a Dhobi by caste (…)

While lecturing at a function in Kochi on September 11, 2012, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, exhorted the Keralites to move out of paddy cultivation and use paddy fields for industries or other profitable purposes. As he is the bureaucratic head of the Planning Commission and the venue was an official meeting conducted by the Government of Kerala, what he said was not his personal opinion but the official decision. In order to arrive at this decision (…)