2013

Malaysia, a very important country in South-East Asia and a vital member of the ASEAN, is facing a huge turmoil in the last couple of years with the hard-core Islamist fundamentalists hell-bent upon the turning the country into a hard-core Islamist state based on the Shariat with Islam as the state religion. Already there are several provinces in Malaysia which follow the Shariat like Selangor, Penang and others; it is also an accepted reality that Malaysia turned Islamic way back in the (…)

by Hiranmoy Roy and Anil Kumar
The expectations of the power sector from Union Budget 20013-14 must be formed on the basis of its present status. Therefore, an examination of the present status of the power sector is of special importance. The electricity generation capacity in India is the fifth largest in the world. India is also the sixth largest consumer of electricity, and accounts for 3.4 per cent of the global energy consumption. Over the past thirty years, the country’s energy (…)

The recently concluded Chintan Shivir of the Congress party will be etched in people’s memory for years to come for two reasons: elevation of Rahul Gandhi as the party’s Vice-President being the first and his candid speech being the second. The nation witnessed a stellar address at the Congress’ Chintan Shivir. The event began on a note of rethinking and realigning the contours of work of the ruling party. The elevation of Rahul Gandhi to the AICC Vice-President, juxtaposed with his speech, (…)

by Tamanna Khosla
The right to freedom of speech as one of the basic human rights is enshrined in the main international human rights documents. Freedom of speech (synonym of freedom of expression) is an inseparable element of a democratic society. Whether the society is democratic or not can be defined by the factor of independent press and mass media. The Constitution of India provides the right to freedom given in Articles 19, 20, 21 and 22, with the view to guaranteeing individual (…)

COMMUNICATION
In recent months the demand for pensions with dignity for all elderly citizens has gathered immense support in India. In the first week of March thousands of elderly citizens from all over the country will be coming to Delhi to strengthen this demand based on the mobilisation effort of the Pension Parishad, an organisation which is leading this exercise.
To sum-up its demands, the Pension Parishad has urged for setting up a system of pensions which will provide one-half of (…)

by V.C. Bhutani
We in India need to call things by their proper names, not sparing the US or Pakistan and not bending over backwards to be nice to China. It is reasonable to assume that the US needs Pakistan in order to complete the ISAF withdrawal by the end of 2014. The end of 2014 is not so very far off. In two years we shall see the ISAF out of Afghanistan altogether. Thereafter the US shall not need Pakistan. Will the US then, in January 2015, make a determination that Pakistan is a (…)

IMPRESSIONS
The soul of modern India is its liberal democracy. Are we in danger of losing it? Communal posturings are getting ever more blatant. Caste leaders are defying the law openly. Intolerance is flaunted as a badge of honour. The government is a bystander, its inaction amounting to abetment.
We won’t be alone if we turn democracy into a mockery. Sukarno, the hero of Indonesia’s freedom struggle, became a demagogue when he got power and proclaimed what he called “guided (…)

With ‘choppergate’—that is, the Rs 350-crore kickbacks allegedly involved in the Rs 3546-crore contract for the purchase of 12 VVIP Augusta-Westland helicopters from the Italian aerospace and defence giant Finmeccanica—assuming a disproportionately large dimension with every passing day, Defence Minister A.K. Antony has moved fast to cancel the deal thereby causing much consternation among his Cabinet colleagues.
In this setting the Budget session of Parliament has opened today and the (…)

February 21 is the International Mother Tongue Day as declared by the United Nations in recognition of the martyrs of the language movement who fell to the Pakistani police’s bullets on that day in 1952 in Dhaka while demanding that their mother tongue, Bangla, be made the official language of East Pakistan. This year February 21 has assumed added significance because of the massive youth mobilisation at Shahbag intersection in Dhaka calling for death to the criminals responsible for the (…)

by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Shahbag Square—where’s that? Abdul Kader Mullah—who’s he? A bunch of university students in Islamabad, with whom I was informally conversing yesterday (February 15), hadn’t heard of either. Of course, they knew of Tahrir Square and Afzal Guru’s recent execution. But they showed little interest upon learning that Shahbag Square was in Dhaka and that, as we spoke, the city was seething with protest. Between 100,000 to 500,000 Bengalis had converged to Shahbag to sing (…)