2014

From N.C.’s Writings
Distinguished revolutionary Kalpana Dutt’s nineteenth death anniversary fell on February 8 this year. It came and went without hardly anyone remembering her on the occasion. Kalpana’s birth centenary on July 27, 2013 also went virtually unnoticed. But we in Mainstream decided to offer our homage to her memory by reproducing the following piece that N.C. wrote precisely nineteen years ago following Kalpana’s demise.
On February 8 passed away in a Calcutta hospital a (…)

Seventeen-year-old Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal, recently fell victim to hate crime in Delhi. The signifies what is fundamentally rotten in the public life of India as a nation. India’s feeble posturing for inclusive policy has remained starkly insufficient to make a dent on its exclusive society. The implications and ramifications of the tragdey befalling the teenager are far more frightening than meet the eye. The so-called mainland in general and the over-hyped Aryavart as the (…)

by Biswajit Roy
Nido Tania reminds me of Bir Nilmani Singh
I did not know Nido, the teenaged student from Arunachal Pradesh in Delhi who died following a racist, parochial attack by some locals, presumably, north Indian men. He paid the price for protesting their taunts about his ‘mongoloid’ look and punk hairstyle. I met Singh, a Meitei elder from Manipur who had joined the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose in his youth. Both are from the country’s North-East region, one of (…)

Respected Medhaji,
Greetings. I’ve learnt from newspaper reports that you’re contesting the Lok Sabha election as a candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
While certainly there are some positive aspects of the AAP and I’ve myself noticed the dedication of some of its activists, at the same time there are several questionable aspects of the AAP’s quick rise to fame and success. Leaving these aside for the time being, I’d like to draw your attention only to what Shri Arvind Kejriwal said (…)

O enfant terrible, What a spanner you have thrown Into the habibual settled ways Of proprietors who can Be heard to groan at the insouciance With which you relentlessly amaze. O picaroon of politics, there seems No end to the tricks you invent To get under the skin of the establishment. Yet, with a billion lives at stake, can You blame those who wonder whether One swallow may that summer make That fills the plain with uplifting heather. Is it a danger that you may be Too full of (…)

As we go to press, news has come that veteran CPI leader Parvathi Krishnan, who played a leading role in mobilising working women under the banner of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), has passed away. She died in a hospital in Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu)—where she and husband, former CPI Secretary N.K. Krishnan, stayed and worked among the local working class—in the early hours of Thursday (February 20, 2014). She would have turned 95 on March 15. She is survived by her daughter, (…)

EDITORIAL
”My heart bleeds to see what is happening in the House. It is sad for democracy to see that such things are happening even after all appeals for calm.”
That was PM Manmohan Singh’s reaction after four Union Ministers belonging to the Congress from Seemandhra—K.S. Rao, D. Purandeswari, K. Suryaprakash Reddy and Chiranjeevi—rushed into the well of the Lok Sabha on February 12 to stage an unprecedented protest against the proposed bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh for setting up a (…)

The following is an appeal addressed on behalf of the Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (FDCA) to the Union Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, and the UP Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav, for restoring peace and harmony in the riot-affected districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh. It was released to the press on January 28, 2014.
The Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (FDCA) was established in July 1993. The main objective of the Forum is to promote harmony and the (…)

It is hoped that the Delhi Law Minister has understood Article 227 of the Constitution of India providing for the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. He, along with Chief Minister Kejriwal, had an audience with the Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court the other day so as to remove any impression of even indirect interference in the domain of the judiciary. It does not behove an AAP Minister to reach late by one hour and disrupt the screening of a film at a public (…)

IMPRESSIONS
The question is not whether India is racist; the question is to what extent India is racist. Biases of a racial kind have always been a feature of our public life. Sometimes they were brushed aside as clowning, like Sardarji jokes; North Indian derision for “Madrassis” was dismissed by the southerners as another instance of the northerners’ ignorance.
Sometimes it went out of control, like the Shiv Sena’s violence against South Indians first and now against Biharis. But the (…)