2015

by Purusottam Bhattacharya
Confounding all the pollsters who had predicted a hung Parliament following the general elections held in Britain on 7 May 2015 the British Prime Minister and Conservative leader, David Cameron, has won an extraordi-nary victory and will remain the Prime Minister for another five years. With nearly all results declared, the Conservatives have won 331 seats in a House of Commons of 650 which is a slender but clear majority. Cameron had to form a coalition (…)

by Vivek Kumar Srivastava
David Cameron’s victory in the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections on May 7 is surprising to many observers because opinion polls had a different opinion. Many scholars had analysed the likely outcome of the parliamentary elections and its impact on the basis of the poll forecast. Now all this has changed as a more strengthened David Cameron continues his second term.
He now faces two major challenges which may decide the future of Europe and the course of (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s 154th birth anniversary was observed last Saturday (May 9, 2011). On this occasion we are reproducing two pieces by N.C. on Tagore written 74 years ago, in 1941. Both were published in The Calcutta Municipal Gazette—Tagore Memorial Special Supplement, September 13, 1941 (that appeared after the Poet’s death on August 7, 1941). The first piece was carried under the pseudonym Vanguard. Though written during World War II when the global (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Cheap sensationalised news handling by television has brought shame to India. Not a new development, it was left to Nepal to expose this internationally. Ironically, and in entirely different contexts, many Indian netas also have suddenly found it convenient to blame the media for the problems they face. The Aam Aadmi’s Arvind Kejriwal has gone to the extent of calling for a public trial of the media. That would be nice. A public trial will bring out the double-standards of (…)

The self-respecting people of Nepal need to be congratulated for compelling the jingoist brahmanical Indian media to ponder over its follies and idiocies in reporting the painful stories of earthquake from Nepal. The thing is that the reportage of TRP-hungry TV channels is not new to us when they market our emotions and sentiments as these are the most ‘saleable’ products in our market apart from sex, rape, babas, tantra, cricket, corporates and Bollywood. It is not unusual for the Indian (…)

by Murzban Jal
If Hindu Raj becomes a reality then it would be the greatest menace to this country. —B.R. Ambedkar,
Pakistan or Partition of India
The ideologues of the RSS are openly flexing their fascist muscles. Whilst Narendra Modi is presenting himself as a cross between a General going to war and an alleged statesman, there is a very clever move where his ideologues are pushing for an aggressive political war of attrition. What one finds is not merely the corporate media that (…)

The Royal legitimacy in Saudi Arabia drawn from religion and rentierism is beset with a number of challenges today. To begin with religion: it is well known that Islam is deeply embedded in the legitimacy discourse of Saudi Arabia. In this perspective, the Ulama1 tied to the Royal family through a religio-political alliance, accords support to the Saudi regime. On the other hand, the rentier state paradigm guarantees the stability of the system through its redistributive mechanism. But the (…)

There is a fairly large group of British investors keenly watching the situation in the wake of the Indian Parliament’s passage of the Constitution (119th Amendment) Bill ratifying the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) during May 6-7.
To them, the road now seems to be opening up for new investment and business opportu-nities over a vast region extending from North-Eastern India through Bangladesh to Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and onwards right down to Vietnam and Indonesia. (…)

On April 28, Sri Lanka commenced a process of constituional change that has passed unnoticed by large sections of the media in this country. The significance of the enactment of the 19th Constitution Amendment by the Sri Lankan Parliament on that day lay in that it undid some of the measures taken by former President Mahinda Rajapakse in recent years to make Sri Lanka a more authoritarian state than it already was. Further, the new amendment marked the beginning of a process that, when (…)

by Michael Todd
The next summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is going to be held at Ufa, Russia on July 9-10, 2015. This will take place along with the summit of the BRICS (an acronym standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) there.
The SCO is an intergovernmental inter-national organisation founded in Shanghai, China on June 15, 2001 by six countries—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its observer states are (…)