2013

After the execution of Ajmal Amir Kasab, the demand for hanging Parliament attacker Afzal Guru gets louder. The 11th anniversary of the Parliament attack in December gave fresh impetus to this demand which insisted that hanging the attacker is the only way to pay tribute to the sacrifice of the martyrs. But in this article I will argue why it is not by hanging Guru, but by giving him a fresh and fair trial, the country can protect its democratic values and pay proper tribute to its martyrs.

The government has announced that bulk diesel consumers like Railways and State Transport Corporations have to purchase diesel at market-determined rates, while diesel purchased at fuel outlets will continue to receive subsidy. Assuming diesel subsidy as Rs 10 per litre, let us examine the effects of the recent government order.
Mr Suresh Kumar (not his real name), living in Bandra, Mumbai, maintains three cars, but we will keep the discussion to the SUV that only he uses. Mr Kumar’s SUV (…)

No doubt, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is less rhetorical than before in its references to Muslims. There can be two reasons for this. One, the party has its eyes fixed on the scenario after the parliamentary elections in early 2014. It would need the support of secular parties to have a majority in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament. Any adverse remark against the Muslims may cost the party and endanger its chances of constituting a viable coalition.
Two, the BJP feels that (…)

by Asghar Ali Engineer
India’s legacy of communalism and communal violence is here to stay, if one goes by the activities of the Rightwing Hindutva forces and the government’s total inaction, nay, paralysis. Communalism in India is taking long strides and the lull in communal violence after the Gujarat riots has been broken and now communal riots are more frequent. The Assam riots had shaken the country like Gujarat did and a series of riots have been taking place one after the other or, (…)

Sri Lankan Tamils were the least surprised and shocked when President Mahinda Rajapaksa in his Independence Day address on February 4 quite bluntly ruled out granting any kind of political autonomy for the Northern Province.
This also marked his quietly reneging on his oft-repeated assurance to the Tamils and the international community that he remained fully committed to facilitating the “13th Amendment plus” approach to solving the ethnic issue. The 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan (…)

Religion has emerged as a major source of conflict in the post-Cold War era all across the globe. A perceptive writer points out that ideological strife has now given place to the “clash of civilisations” and predicts that in the foreseeable future, religion will be a major source of conflict within and among nations.
Samuel Huntington asserts that possibilities of conflict are greater in what he calls the “fault-lines of civilisation”, those areas such as India, where different cultures (…)

IMPRESSIONS
The soul of modern India is its liberal demo-cracy. 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 (…)

The famous scene from the Hollywood film Enemy at the Gates captured the zeitgeist well, when addressing a room full of the Soviet military officers right on the Stalingrad front in World War II, the newly-appointed Commissar of the Red Army, Nikita Khrushchev, who was sent by Joseph Stalin specially to stem the retreat in the face of the German assault, shouts:
“My name is Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I’ve come to take things in hand here. This city… is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor (…)

That is how the Chinese put it: ‘from revolution to reform and market’. Market, reform and ‘getting rich’ are the buzz-words in China today as it is undergoing massive changes and is emerging as an economic power. When asked about them, the academics and leaders in China explain that their country is going through a transition from ‘revolution and class struggle’ to reform, market and harmonious development. There is less of ideological Marx and Mao and more of pragmatic Deng and Hu combined (…)

by O.P. Sabherwal
From the scenario of the sixties, let me recall an episode in October 1960 that is of contem-porary relevance. The then Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, on his last visit to India, addressed a press conference comprising some 300 Indian and foreign journalists on the roof-top of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The theme: India-China boundary dispute and its solution.
It was a lucid and comprehensive solution that the Chinese leader proposed. This, in substance, is what Zhou Enlai put (…)