2014

TRIBUTE
Remembering Bipan Chandra, the teacher, whose contributions to history were seminal
by Mukul Mangalik
Sadness gripped me when I heard of Professor Bipan Chandra’s passing on August 30, 2014. Before it could settle in, however, images took over, memories from the 1970s when I was a student and Bipan saheb a teacher at the Centre for Historical Studies (CHS), JNU.
I remembered the not-very-large man that he was, armed with big ideas and a mountain of historical data, arguing, (…)

TRIBUTE
by Nandana Reddy
Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy or Ananthu, as I affectionately called him, was one of the bards of Indian polity. Not unlike William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, he commented on events, ridiculed fundamentalism and mocked authority. From his deeply embedded socialist convictions he examined modern times through the lens of democracy. He questioned all things and analysed all motives in the belief that it would lead to a deepening of democracy. On January (…)

WOMEN‘S WORLD
by Tamanna Khosla
I
The marital rape exemption can be traced to statements by Sir Mathew Hale, Chief Justice in England, during the 1600s. He wrote: “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given herself in kind unto the husband, whom she cannot retract.” Not surprisingly, thus, married women were never the subject of rape laws. Laws bestowed an absolute immunity (…)

You who teach in schools and colleges
And are called ‘teachers’ have
Come to believe that you are teachers.
Employees that you are, we call
You guru to keep in place an idea
Whose social yield is quiescence—
Suited to good governance by
One great man who alone is true guru,
With certification from Naguru.
So, on guru utsav day, please know
That your job is not to teach
But to obey. And if you are a guru
On contract, it is just a fact
Without which no (…)

by Imtiaz Ahmad Ansari
The recent brutal gang-rape and subsequent murder of two Dalit girls in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, has again put the nation in a shameful situation. It has put a question-mark on the very civility about which we, as Indians, have always boasted. Many have started comparing the Badaun gang-rape with the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape. However, these are not the only brutal assaults on women. The phenomenon of rape is going unabated in every part of India, be it rural or (…)

COMMUNICATION
Although the under-negotiation trade treaties TTP and TTIP do not involve India directly (at least not yet) their combined impact on the world economy is likely to be so great that all countries have to watch carefully for the adverse effects.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) is led by the USA and includes Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunie. It has been under negotiation for about four years.
The (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The most striking feature of the first hundred days of the Modi Government that stands out in sharp relief is that the main plank of his election campaign—development—has taken a back seat while the RSS agenda, which Modi never highlighted in his campaign, is getting top priority partly of the government but mainly of his party, the BJP. The dissolution of the Planning Commission exposes Modi’s avowed commitment to development. The other big promise that he made was to (…)

by Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee
Professor Bipan Chandra, affectionately called Bipan by his students and friends, legendary teacher, scholar and activist, passed away peacefully in his sleep on the morning of August 30, 2014 at his residence at the National Media Centre in Gurgaon, where he had moved since his retirement from the Jawaharlal Nehru University more than twenty years ago. As news spread of his demise, his house was flooded by former students, colleagues, neighbours, (…)

The Independence Day speech of the PM announced that the Planning Commission, set up in 1950, would be closed. Given that this institution has played a central role in the way the government functioned in India, does this announcement presage a major institutional change in governance? A new body/think-tank is supposed to replace this institution. Would this proposed institution essentially do what the Planning Commission did but under a different name and rubric? One may also ask whether in (…)

Ideology unites, bringing like-minded people under a common sky. But ideology also divides: friends, who have enjoyed one another’s company for long years during their adolescence and early youth, attending music, poetry and dance recitals together, watched together with avidity avant-garde films and had literary taste which differed only slightly from one another’s, suddenly realised from a chance happening that their political and economic points of view were sharply at variance. This is (…)