2014

Commentary
by Navneet Sharma, Harikrishnan B. and Pradeep Nair
“Pakistan and Bangladesh are the 31st and 32nd states of India. Cow is our national animal. Swadeshi is my birthright. The Indraprastha is the Capital of the Akhand Hindu Rashtra. Hindi is our national language. ‘Ma Bharti’ is our national anthem. The national flag is of saffron colour. Hinduism is the oldest civilisation and the Nobel Prize is instituted in the name of Dinanath Batra.”
In this commentary, we wish to (…)

by Sanjay Parikh
The Supreme Court, in a petition filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), has laid down as many as 16 guidelines which have to be treated as law declared under Article 141 of the Constitution. The Order dated September 23, 2014 of the Apex Court is applauded as well as criticised.
The occasion to lay down the guidelines arose out of a writ petition filed by the PUCL in the Bombay High Court questioning the 99 police encounters which had taken place between (…)

Mahatma Gandhi is today widely accepted internationally as one of the most admired leaders of the 20th century with an enduring contribution to world peace. However, increasingly his legacy is being disputed by critics who raise serious questions ranging from his several questionable decisions during the freedom movement to his stand on the Dalit and gender issues (also his controversial celibacy experiments). Unfortunately some followers of Gandhiji entirely ignore the voices of criticism. (…)

The Editors Guild on September 29 strongly condemned the attack on senior journalist and its former President, Rajdeep Sardesai, by a group claiming to be supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Sardesai—who, according to eyewitness accounts, kept trying to pacify a crowd of around 60 people—was “abused in the vilest language”, and manhandled at the Madison Square Garden in New York. “This mob mentality to silence those with divergent views is not acceptable,” the Guild said and uged (…)

Go back a thousand years or so,
And you will find a golden bird;
She chirps aloft the Himalayas,
And spreads her wing so wide
That a nation forms from head
To foot, and from side to side,
Drawn with streaks of molten gold
And rivers of golden tide.
There the radiant Brahmin rehearses
His uncanny yogic stroke,
Connecting by Vedic mantra
The earth with swarg-lok.
Alas, but nothing he could do
Held back the marauders;
They rampaged down each golden
Town, and (…)

by G. Gangadhara Rao
Introduction
Many thinkers doubt the economic ideology of Gandhi, since they believe that it is not a suitable method either as a policy or as an approach. But gradually this way of thinking has been changing across the world. Kazuya Ishii says: “Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts seem to be attracting more and more attention nowadays, as the domination among nations and the destruction of the environment are globally questioned.” (Kazuya Ishii, p. 297, 2001) There has been (…)

by Suresh Jnaneswaran
The controversy of Ms Arundhati Roy’s Mahatma Ayyankali address at Thiruvanantha-puram refuses to subside. It has assumed a momentum of its own and moving around the globe on its own volition. The socio-political issues raised by Arundhati Roy have agitated the country in the past and has assumed turbulent proportions in the present especially in the context of religious terrorism and Maoism breathing down our necks. Instead of deliberating on the core issues raised (…)

by Sukumaran C.V.
Delivering the Mahatma Ayyankali address at an international seminar on “Re-imagining Struggles at the Margins: A History of the Unconquered and the Oppressed” organised by the Mahatma Ayyankali Chair, Department of History, University of Kerala, Arundhati Roy told that ‘it is time to unveil a few truths about a person whose doctrine of non-violence was based on the acceptance of a most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system’. The ‘person’ she referred to is (…)

MUSINGS
Till about yesterday I sat wondering where are those Indians or Americans who can dare talk of the dark realities, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaves for his tour to America. Well, here comes the news that the Ghadar Alliance—a US-based educational/watchdog coalition created by concerned citizens in the wake of the BJP victory—is releasing on September 26, a comprehensive ‘100-day report’ evaluating the performance of the Modi Govern-ment’s first 100 days in office.
The (…)

In more than a decade of its existence, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has proved itself as an effective inter-state association. The mechanisms established for collaboration allow the institution and coordination of joint constructive efforts in different fields. Several countries and global organisations have displayed their increasing interest in cooperating with the SCO in various formats. All these facts indicate that the SCO is becoming a significant factor in regional as (…)