2015

Not many in Pakistan, still fewer in India, recalled that this March 23 marked the 75th year of the Muslim League’s resolution to demand partition of India. The Lahore resolution, as it was called, said: “That no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may (…)

by Jayabrata Sarkar
Over the past three-and-a-half centuries, the principles and practices of the Westphalian Treaty (1648) gradually spread from Europe to the rest of the world. The Westphalian order assumed a vital importance for three main reasons. First, it secularised international politics by divorcing it from any particular religious footing, anchoring it instead on the tenets of national interest and reasons of state. Second, it promoted sovereignty, the legal doctrine that no (…)

The SCs/STs are recognised as indigenous people of the country. They constitute more than 25 per cent of the country’s population. However, at the United Nations, the Government of India had consistently denied existence or applicability of the concept of “indigenous peoples” to these groups though the country had voted in their favour at the General Assembly on September 13, 2007. India is also a signatory to the International Labour Organisation Convention concerning the Protection and (…)

by Shubhra Seth
The feeling of returning home gives a sense of respite and belonging to many. But how does one feel when the home does not give a sense of belonging and it is just a mere lifeless structure that one returns to every day, for the simple reason that, what was once upon a time their home, today no longer welcomes them? The Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) live with this dilemma every day. Living in relief colonies or camps, their condition is similar to that of refugees as (…)

MUSINGS
Those of us who’d looked and sounded aghast at those officially conducted beheadings and killings in several countries, need to speak out at the barbaric lynching of a rape accused in Nagaland’s Dimapur. For one, every rape accused needs to defend his case; chances are that the accused was framed and with that nailed. And in this bizarre case, the accused, Farid Khan, could not have been dragged out of the prison hell-hole without the official support of the jailor /jail staff and (…)

COMMUNICATION
It is really shocking that neither during the election campaign of Delhi Assembly elections nor on the occasion of the swearing ceremony, Mr Kejriwal, the Aam Admi Party chief, has not condemned communalism which is the gravest menace not only to Indian secular democracy but to the very existence of the country. Over and above all this he has not uttered a single word against the RSS plan of converting India into a Hindi country and establishing a Hindu state and the Modi (…)

by Tika Ram Sharma
The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) celebrated the 50th anniversary of its foundation last year. While for the CPM the split was a matter of ‘celebration’, for others in the Left it was a disaster. There have been statements from the CPM leaders about the achievements and failures of their movement of these fifty years. According to the CPI-M, the split in the movement in India was a ‘historic necessity’. As per the ideological document of the 2012 Congress of (…)

by Vineet Tiwari
Is it wrong for people of different communities to co-exist peacefully and celebrate each other’s festivals? Is it a sin for people to believe that the greatest faith on earth is humanity?
On the other hand is this something to be proud of that in our effort to make our own religion great, we have to insult other religions? Is this good politics that instead of employment opportunities our unemployed youth should be handed swords and trishuls? That instead of providing (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Fundamentalism has become a much-used term today—in politics and in the academia. And there are in vogue various types of the so-called fundamentalists—political, religious and cultural.
But before cataloguing these various tribes of fundamentalists, it is important to clarify what precisely is meant by fundamentalism. The Oxford English Dictionary says the term, fundamental, pertains to “the basis or groundwork, going to the root of the matter”. But the word (…)

IMPRESSIONS
The way the world reacted to Lee Kuan Yew’s passing was a measure of the greatness he had achieved as the Prime Minister of Singapore. His lifelong disappointment was that he did not have a country big enough to match his vision. He made up by turning Singapore into a world showpiece, marked by efficiency, beauty, cleanliness and absence of perceptible corruption. In his later years he also achieved the status of a philosopher-king whose views were sought by other countries, (…)