2014

There are many signs that the NDA Govern-ment is going ahead with the agenda of GM crops and the multinational companies which control these crops, ignoring the strong scientific evidence against GM (genetically modified) crops.
Some senior leader within the BJP and the wider Sangh Parivar told this writer that they think the GM crops will be a disaster, but obviously the government is not listening to this viewpoint.
Some State governments, including those ruled by the BJP, have (…)

EDITORIAL
Replying to a debate on ‘ghar wapsi’ (homecoming) or reconversion of Muslims to Hinduism—initiated in the Lok Sabha by Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia—Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu yesterday, inadver-tently or willingly, exposed the real face of the BJP when he stoutly defended the RSS as a “great” institution to which “we are proud to belong as it is our mother organisation”. This was sufficient proof, if such evidence was at all needed, of where the BJP leaders stand on the (…)

This was the fifteenth annual summit between India and Russia but since this happened to be the first summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a swiftly changing global geopolitical environment, there were strategic affairs experts predicting a certain degree of uncertainty in the cooperation between the two time-tested, all-weather, special and strategic partners. The latest Indo-Russian summit after a new government came to power in Delhi and (…)

In the death of Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, who entered his 100th year last month, the country as a whole has become poorer, not just the world of Indian jurisprudence.
In one of the most incisive tributes to the departed personality, Prof Upendra Baxi, currently Emeritus Professor of the UK’s University of Warwick, observed that Justice Krishna Iyer “has done much, as a justice and a human being, to eliminate the conceptual distinction between India and Bharat”.
Born in Kerela’s Palakkad (…)

We offer our sincere homage to his abiding memory by reproducing two of his pieces that appeared in Mainstream—an article and an open letter—in 2007. We are also carrying two tributes from persons who knew him well.
Indian Constitution—Some Creative Mutations Mooted
V.K. KRISHNA IYER
More than a semi-centennial span has passed and several amendments inscribed making our long and complicated Constitution an arcane, logomachic and even obscurantist instrument. This supreme deed is now a (…)

IMPRESSIONS
If style maketh the man, opinion maketh the judge. A wise opinion memorably expressed goes directly into the conscience of society and the annals of time. Such was the opinion: “Law without politics is blind. Politics without law is deaf.” It was an aphorism that marked the personality, the commitment and the intellectualism of Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer. Some 700 judgments he pronounced from the Bench of the Supreme Court and all of them were studded with bold ideas boldly (…)

When Prof Julius Stone, one of the most distinguished legal scholars of last century, passed away, his disciple, himself a great contemporary jurist, Prof Upendra Baxi, in a moving tribute, wrote: “Writing is a career of death in a sense it signifies the absence of the author”. In this sense, the great writing is a gateway to immortality. From this perspective, the profoundly erudite judgments penned down by great judges are more perdurable than great advocacy of eminent counsels. The (…)

The annual address to the Federal Assembly by the Russian President is an occasion to dilate on the state policies, but this year’s speech by Vladimir Putin on December 4 at the Kremlin’s St George Hall before a 1000-strong audience of the country’s elites was invested with special importance.
To be sure, there is an extraordinary setting today where Russia’s national policies and strategies are at a crossroads and the country has important choices to make. The West is forcing upon Russia (…)

The following article has been written on the occasion of the Human Rights Day (December 10).
For those behind bars
The best moments in my life are those when I stood outside a jail waiting for my client to step out—a free man again. Yes they were all men, I had no women clients who were in jail in all my thirty years practice.
There were the Burmese students who had crossed the border to take refuge in India and found themselves in an Indian jail; there were Naga villagers arrested by (…)

The Indian National Army (INA) was the force which Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose had raised when he was living in Singapore after escaping British rule in India. The force was meant to be an armed hand of the people participating in the national struggle and drew people from all communities.
Netaji differed from Mahatma Gandhi’s approach of non-violent movement to oust the British. Netaji believed that non-violence could be an ideology but not a creed. The national movement should be free (…)