2014

MUSINGS
Finally, the people of this country have woken up! The by-poll results are enough to show that we, as an electorate, have matured and can see, rather foresee, the dangers of communal politics. We don’t want to be divided and ruined by communally charged politicians. We want to exist in peace and earn our daily bread without the politicians grabbing those morsels.
Enough of hate politics! Enough of communal propaganda! Enough of poison unleashed! It’s a combination of all this (…)

EDITORIAL
It is a welcome sign indeed that politics has taken a back-seat while confronting nature’s fury in Kashmir. As floods ravage and cause havoc in large parts of the Valley including the capital Srinagar taking quite a toll of lives and numerous citizens are still stranded across the State, the armed forces and Air Force alongwith the National Disaster Response Force have mounted rescue efforts braving all odds with the nation united behind them to meet the challenge of the (…)

Key diplomatic exchanges or matters of state are almost axiomatically obscured from the world. Reportage does not necessarily sharpen our flair for analysis or speculation. Yet it could provide the ineluctable reality, as much as the grist for a searching hypothesis. In that tentative vein, has Narendra Modi’s reported bonding with Shinzo Abe opened up a worldview that others have either not grasped, or are no longer inclined to dare, particularly when it is more immediately utilitarian than (…)

by Ramakrushna Pradhan
Undoubtedly, India and Japan are friends from antiquity; share a superb and timeless bonding free of any kind of dispute—ideological, cultural and territorial. And the naturalness of the partnership opened up only recently with Modi’s assumption of the Prime Minister’s office in India. Although they are unique kind of nations in Asia having reciprocal sentimental standing, generous gestures and popular goodwill towards each other which can rarely be found among other (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Vietnam: the Mai Lai Massacre is known as “the most shocking episode of the Vietnam war”. One morning in 1968, a platoon of US soldiers entered the sprawling Vietnamese village, saw men and women and children getting ready to go to the market, and began shooting without warning. A man was pushed into a well and a grenade thrown into it. Some 20 women and children kneeled before a temple deity praying. They were all shot in the head. Some 70-80 villagers were pushed into an (…)

Meenakshipuram, a village in Ramanatha-puram (now Theni) district in Tamil Nadu, was the epicentre of an extraordinary social, political and religious upheaval in 1981. A large number of men and women belonging to the Pallan community, who are Scheduled Caste,1 had embraced Islam there. Th is created consternation across India and a strong feeling of anger, abomination as also nervousness marked by accusation and allegation pervaded the atmos-phere. Untouchability, discrimination and (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
September 5 this year marked Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan‘s 126th birth anniversary. Every year September 5 is observed as Teacher’s Day in honour of the second President of our Republic since he was a great teacher. This year too Teacher’s Day was observed throughout the country but the focus was on PM Narendra Modi and not a word was written in the media about the genesis of the Day with reference to Dr Radhakrishnan; in fact Narendra Modi himself only cursorily (…)

It appears that the magic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is waning. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has met a reverse in the bypolls. Out of the 18 seats in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar, the BJP won only seven. The parliamentary election held nearly four months ago saw the BJP sweeping and even getting a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha.
The disenchantment of the voters in such a small period is indeed a point of deeper analysis. True, the party made too many promises (…)

The Concept of Inclusive Growth
The concept of inclusive growth, as stated in the 12th Plan document, focuses on the growth process that is broad-based or in which wider sections of the population, especially those hitherto excluded, participate. This implies, among other things, stepping up the GDP growth rate in the slow growing or less developed regions through the development of infrastructure; greater priority to agriculture which contributes to food security and provides livelihood (…)

It seems the turning-point in the Ukrainian crisis has finally arrived after more than four months of civil war in the country that has claimed thousands of innocent lives. When Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko’s promise to end the war in several hours could not be materialised, he set a new deadline for bringing the rebels to their knees in the east of the country. This time it was August 24—Ukraine’s independence day—which President Poros-henko had planned to celebrate with a lot of (…)