2014

The exposure of the Darjeeling hills towards the tit-bits of electoral politics can be traced back to 1937, the year when the first-ever elections in the hills took place. According to the provisions of the Government of India Act 1935, the Darjeeling hill region was declared as a ‘partially excluded area’ and allotted one member to be elected to the Provincial Legislature of the then Bengal. Again in 1946 the political enthusiasm registered by the people and hill leaders regarding the (…)

by Sadhan Mukherjee
Have our students stopped dreaming or thinking big? Don’t they feel that in the rapidly advancing modern world they have no place near the top? Conversely, why are we not trying to educate them for the future, their own and that of the country? Will the new dispensation in the governance of the country now push the country back to the gurukul tradition or advance with modern, need-based education? These are not rhetorical issues but comprise a serious inquiry.
In the (…)

by Murzban Jal
All educational work in the field in the Soviet Republic of Workers and Peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the overthrow of the bourgeois, the abolition of all classes, and the elimination of all forms of exploitation of man by man. V.I. Lenin (…)

EDITORIAL
Last week a fervent appeal was made in these columns to de-escalate the rising tensions along the India-Pakistan border.
The ceasefire violations and firing on the LoC and international border in J&K have gradually declined although these can again recur with serious consequences in the days ahead.
However, what is of utmost significance is that last Friday (October 10) the Nobel Peace Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 to Kailash Satyarthi of India (…)

Since the results of the general election were declared, I have been in a state of unbelief. The country now has at its head a man who has widely been called a mass murderer, who likened a massacre of Muslim citizens to the accidental death of a “kutte ka bachcha”, who delights in preening for the cameras holding swords and wearing diverse kinds of head-gear, and whose stated qualification for the top job is a thorax whose circumference is 142 centimetres.
Modi may well be described as a (…)

TRIBUTE
Preeti Banerjee (nee Sarkar) bade adieu to the mundane world on August 25 at 91. She was perhaps the last living member of the central squad of the Indian People’s Theatre Assocation (IPTA), the mass front of culture of the Communist Party of India. Her golden voice and the famous song Sare Jahanse Achchha, a household song in the late 1940s, were one as Pandit Ravi Shankar set the lyric of the famous poem of Mohammad Iqbal (written in 1904) into a song at the instance of the (…)

“The very first thing that our future National Government will have to do would be to set up a commission for drawing up a comprehensive plan of reconstruction.”
—Subhash Bose’s Presidential Address at Haripura Congress (February 19, 1938)
One of the most important strengths of any democracy is the ability to recognise serious mistakes at the right time and to take corrective action before it is too late. It is of crucial importance that India’s democracy should be able to pass this test (…)

by B.P. Singh
The following is the text of an address by the author at the World Summit 2014 organised by the Universal Peace Foundation (Seoul, South Korea, August 10-12, 2014).
Thank you, Mr President Walsh, for inviting me to speak before this august World Summit so imaginatively organised by the World Peace Federation. I am particularly impressed by the theme of the Summit: Peace, Security and Human Development. This is a subject dear to my professional experience as well as to the (…)

Rabindranath Tagore wrote six poems on Sikh heroism and martyrdom, two in 1888, three in 1898, and one in 1935. Of them three are on Guru Gobind Singh, one on Banda Bahadur, one on Bhai Torusingh, and one on the boy, Nehal Singh.
The Guru Gobind Singh poems are spaced between his twenty year-long sâdhanâ to be worthy of his leadership, and his death, the height of the sâdhanâ being his refusal to a rich gift brought by a disciple (the theme so enthralled Tagore that he wrote the same poem (…)

The Sikhs are a small, sturdy community in India. Since it is limited in size it is very protective about its identity. It often over-reacts but that is the sign of its assertion that it does not want to be taken cursorily.
Punjab, the community’s, home State, has witnessed many morchas (movements) of the Sikhs. But if one were to probe every movement of theirs one would infer that its search for identity had propelled the community to defy the authorities.
Punjab Chief Minister Prakash (…)