2014

I
If the annual BRICS summit meeting, which just ended in Fortaleza, Brazil, assumed an unprecedented level of interest in India, three reasons could be attributed to it.
First and foremost, India has a new govern-ment which took office in late May. The new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi is not exactly a stranger to international diplomacy and foreign policy, but during the election campaign for the 2014 parliamentary poll, he almost exclusively focused on domestic issues, and other than (…)

(Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow and the celebrated author of The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan and, most recently, of The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide. In this wide-ranging interview, she spoke to Ather Farouqui, the General Secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), New Delhi, on a host of issues.)
The following interview (…)

Like many of my fellow citizens I too watched the recent interview of Natwar Singh by Karan Thapar. The contents of the interview made front-page headlines in national newspapers. Having heard the interview in which Karan Thapar emphasised that the 80-year-old diplomat-turned-politician had revealed much more in the interview than he had done in his book. What has he revealed?
This is not in defence of Sonia Gandhi. She is capable of defending herself. This is not in defence of the (…)

by Sri Ram Pandeya
The recent outcry in responsible scholarly discussions about the secular setting of our society getting affected due to a leader becoming the Prime Minister of India, even as he vows to homogenise society, has led to a renewal of interest in some of our democratic values. While the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been attributed to the more secular development agenda, it is a victory for the majority community as well (at least) for two reasons: first, (…)

We face a problem of value-judgment today. Place and time have something to do with it. Post-independence, people from the older cosmopolitan cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai were most visibly “political”. The others are now being seen and heard. We had an amorphous “intelligentsia”, which wielded power and influence disproportionate to its middle class genesis, but was bona fide nevertheless. This configuration was spawned by a rich-agrarian—political-party-bureaucracy alignment. It (…)

by Murzban Jal
Finally, in the struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to streng-then, along with the repressive powers,the resourcesand centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor. But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, under (…)

MUSINGS
Last week I was in Uttar Pradesh. And I saw and sensed communal politics at its peak. Citizens, cutting across communities and castes, sat apprehensive and worried. It was more than writ large that the BJP and Right-wing outfits are spreading poison, dividing people on religious and caste lines. Though these divisions have been ongoing right from the early nineties but now this poison is getting unleashed right into rural belts, under all possible garbs and ploys and (…)

IMPRESSIONS
In this season of rape...ugh, what a miserable way to start a column! If only we could say instead: "In this land of milk and honey where the sun shines equally on all and the birds..." But that would be false. In our country the sun shineth the way rain raineth. The rain it raineth on the just/And also on the unjust fella/But chiefly on the just, because/The unjust have the just’s umbrella. Brutality hits both men and women, but chiefly women because men have the backing of (…)

The BJP has been brought to power at the Centre by the Indian corporates in place of the Congress-led UPA-2, which is a decaying force, to extend the capitalist rule of the Indian neo-liberal exploitative system. Narendra Modi, the head of the BJP’s National Campaign Committee, as chosen by the RSS, had been fielded in this battle as an Iron Man or Vikash Purush. The centre-stage was set by the BJP/RSS and their allies of the bourgeois ruling class with the following demands:
a) The (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by G. Omkarnath
Indian Economy since Independence: Persisting Colonial Disruption by Arun Kumar; Vision Books, New Delhi; pp. xxiv + 792 (hardbound); price: Rs 1450.
At the turn of the new millennium, the Indian economy has attracted scholarly atte-ntion for two distinct reasons. First, there is the natural urge to assess its place and potential in the face of major shifts in global polity and economy. The collapse of the Soviet block, the phoenix-like rise of China and a (…)