2014

by N.V.K. Murthy
Sometimes I wonder at the changes that science and technology have made in my own life spanning nine decades. I was brought up in a British cantonment town in colonial India. My first memory goes back to the days when we had storm lanterns that used kerosene. I remember the daily chore that my mother had of cleaning three or four such lanterns, filling them with kerosene, and lighting them at dusk. Also, at this time in India, water was mainly drawn from wells, because (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Here’s something that should rivet Narendra Modi’s attention. “Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilised world—nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty—had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods—the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and (…)

(Jawaharlal Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary was befittingly observed by a grateful nation on November 14. On this occasion we continue to publish/reproduce more articles on Nehru.)
The following contribution from Nehru’s biographer, Dr S. Gopal, was published in Mainstream (November 12, 1988). It is based on the Ansari Memorial Lecture which he delivered at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi on February 22, 1988. It is now being reproduced here because of its relevance in the present (…)

I remember the first time I saw Nehru.
It was soon after the police action that liberated Hyderabad from Nizam’s rule. I must have been about 12 at the time. A friend of mine and I were walking towards a disused golf course close to my home where we often played cricket. It was early in the morning. Two horsemen came cantering along on their horses. One was General J.N. Chaudhuri who was the Military Governor of Hyderabad at the time and the second was Jawaharlal Nehru. He looked like a (…)

It is an irony of history that the name of Mahatma Gandhi should within a few years of his martyrdom serve as no more than a mascot for perpetrators and abettors of oppression and exploitation. His name has been mouthed times without number by the very persons who either in office or outside the seats of power have done their best to prevent the realisation of his ideal of social and economic equality. Under the rule of so-called Gandhians over two decades the rich have become richer and (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
The inherent strength of a nation lies in its ability to remain calm and act with coolness and courage when faced with a critical situation. That today India is able to do so when external danger and internal difficulties threaten to disrupt her security, sovereignty and stability, is because Jawaharlal Nehru was the architect of the basic essentials and inspires of the spirit which go to make such a nation.
Remembering Nehru today on his eighty-second birth (…)

by Mohd. Yousuf Dar
Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889 at Allahabad. He was an upholder of some of the concrete political values. He believed in socialism, secularism, democracy and the modern values of positivism. The contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru is rightly acclaimed as the maker of modern India. Having faith in the Indian people, he sought to build a democratic polity and an economically modernised nation.
He was both a thinker as well as a political practitioner. He (…)

The Nehruvian framework today has become a terrain for the historic battle between the forces of progress and those of Rightwing reaction. It has always been. We have entered a phase where the reactionary forces seek to distort the legacy of the freedom movement by usurping and destroying it. They also seek to destroy everything achieved by India after freedom as a continuation of the ideology of national liberation.
The history of post-independence India has been fashioned around the main (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
We have to distinguish between the Socialist Movement which tries to carry out transformation in the mode of production and Feminist Movements with a limited agenda of “equality”, though the latter would in fact also require very drastic transformation. Both are today in a deadlock because of neo-liberal capitalism having dissolved the attempt of even thinking, leave alone building, a socialist economy. Everybody is now caught up in the world market and widening polarisation (…)

Siddhartha Nath Singh, the BJP leader in charge of West Bengal, has made a highly controversial comment, which may kick up a hullabaloo at the national level. Right at this moment there is no need to give much attention to Siddhartha Nath’s allegation that Mamata Banerjee had taken help from the Jamaat of Bangladesh to win certain Assembly seats situated near the Indo-Bangladesh border as the BJP leader has failed to cite any credible source save some intelligence reports of the Bangladesh (…)