2015

Introduction
South Korea’s ties with China reached a new milestone when President Park Geun-hye attended China’s ceremony and military parade on September 3 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the country’s “victory” in the “War of Resistance Against Japan” and “Anti-Fascist War”. Besides the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin during the function, that raised rumours of a new kind of Sino-Russo axis emerging, President Park’s attendance and China’s neglect of North Korea gave (…)

To many observers of the Bihar election scenario, it would seem that the battle is really between two personalities—and voter appeal —of the performing Nitish Kumar and the promising-the-paradise Narendra Modi. This is underlined by the fact that the BJP has failed to name its chief ministerial candidate ahead of the polls. Pre-poll surveys indicate an over-whelming preference for Nitish as Chief Minister, with BJP’s Sushil Modi trailing far behind as a distant second. BJP’s propaganda is (…)

IMPRESSIONS
A. Surya Prakash showed how to do it, today’s culture vultures are showing how not to do it. In a well-researched analysis in 2009, Surya Prakash told us how at least 450 government programmes involving public expenditure of lakhs of crores of rupees had been named after Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, dragging in Jawaharlal Nehru, too, for good measure.
Consider just a few of the projects he listed and we can see the enormity of what was going on. The Rajiv Gandhi (…)

Now that Mamata Banerjee has served the appetiser, everybody is hungering after the big meal. The 64 Netaji files running into 12,744 pages that the West Bengal Chief Minister declassified on September 18 seem to indicate that Netaji had survived the air crash. The rest is mostly marginal details, besides a few missing phrases or sentences in the papers that only deepen the mystery without revealing much. The real story though, one assumes, rests in the files in possession of the Central (…)

Leaders of different communities had so much confidence in the fairness of the country when it won freedom that none of them wanted reservations. The Muslim leaders rejected the then Home Minister Sardar Patel’s offer of a 15 per cent quota in government jobs and educatio-nal institutions. Their argument was that reservations fostered a parochial thinking. The country had paid an enormous price in the shape of partition for the communal electorate introduced by the British.
Law Minister (…)

by Sanjal Shastri
Over the last few days, Nepal has taken giant steps in its journey to become a constitutional democracy. The accepting of the Constitution marks a new stage in a decade-long effort to usher in a constitutional framework. Unfortunately, this important phase has been marred by significant violence and protests. The two questions in everyone’s mind are: who is to blame and what can be done to make this transition a peaceful one?
We need to keep in mind that Nepal’s road to (…)

At times one cannot but feel sorry for the Foreign Secretary. Over the years, his has become a thankless job. The incumbent official, S. Jaishankar, is being pilloried for having been lackadaisical in preventing Nepal from adopting just this sort of an unhelpful Constitution that it has chosen to adopt.
His lapse? Apparently, the detractors and critics say Jaishankar should have visited Kathmandu to do some arm-twisting in the month of August when the country’s draft Constitution was in (…)

by Vijay Pratap
Nepali, Indian and international media—all have published extensively the debates on the dynamics of Constitution-making and its promul-gation in Nepal. The viewpoints of both the establishments of India and Nepal have been aggressively and explicitly stated. But the views of the Indian civil society have not seen the light of the day adequately in the mainstream media, social network sites or even the alternative media.
A small section of the Indian civil society and (…)

by Jayant Prasad
Nepal’s transition to a pluralist democracy faces a final challenge — failure of the three major parties to accommodate the legitimate demands of Janajati and Madhesi groups for true federalism. Greater consensus and not the imposition of an artificial deadline can help overcome it.
The long-awaited promulgation of a new Constitution within the next few days in Nepal was expected to be the culmination of its transition to a pluralist democracy. The institu-tionalisation (…)

BOOK REVIEW
To Choose Our Future by Ashok Khosla; Development Alternatives and Academic Foundation, New Delhi; 2015; pages 127.
Sustainable Development holds the key to India’s future and its prosperity. Unfortunately the model of development we have adopted, post-1990s economic liberalisation, is leading to vast environmental degradation, threatening the very existence of life in our planet, simul-taneously creating a dysfunctional economy, in which a vast army of hungry and deprived (…)