2015

The Union Budget is prepared to execute the state policy and constitutional mandate of a sovereign republic. The Finance Minister leads the budgeting process and its control while the citizens develop an understanding over it according to the atmosphere created by the media and how the political parties project it. However, there exists differences in the opinions of the media, scholars, activists, NGOs, corporates and unemployed depending on how they have been impacted by the Budget. In its (…)

Dr Rammanohar Lohia’s 105th birth anniversary falls on March 23 this year. Since his birthday coincided with the day of martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, he never wanted his followers to observe or celebrate his birthday. However, we remember him and offer tributes to the abiding memory of that stormy petrel of the Indian socialist movement on this occasion by reproducing two articles. The first article, written by a veteram journalist (the first editor of Mainstream who later (…)

I am certain that the life and activities of Dr Rammanohar Lohia, that remarkable socialist leader who left an indelible imprint on the Indian political scene in both the pre-indepen-dence period and the two decades following independence (that is, till his untimely demise on October 12, 1967), have been propagated throughout the country in the last two years (2009-11) in order to ensure the revival of a vibrant democratic socialist movement which is the imperative need of the hour in the (…)

TRIBUTE
by Noor Zaheer
The show is over, the actors and director have taken the last bow and curtain call and from a crowded auditorium after the thunderous applause has died down, friends and acquaintances are walking up with smiles, hugs and congratulations. I look around searching the face of the person responsible for our theatre group being in Agra for the convention of the Indian People’s Theatre Association [IPTA], the one who had been scouring India for units still functioning as (…)

Legendary freedom fighter and martyr Bhagat Singh’s birth centenary was observed on September 28, 2007. On the occasion of the eightyfourth anniversary of his martyrdom, we are reproducing the following article (published earlier in Mainstream) in homage to the outstanding revolutionary hero’s abiding memory. He was executed along with Sukhdev and Rajguru in Lahore on March 23, 1931. He was and remains to this day a source of inspiration for our youth. This article carries excerpts from Ajoy (…)

by Harsh Kapoor
Let us begin with some jottings from history. In our imagination Greece occupies the bedrock of key Western ideas with its first city states and the idea of democracy, but that was ancient Greece. Modern Greece, as we know, has had an important place in Europe after it emerged breaking free from the Ottoman empire in the 1820s with the intervention of France, Britain and Russia. A very poor and essentially rural country then with a limited state under the deep sway of (…)

by Manoj Misra
can Modi rejuvenate Ganga?
—No and Yes.
—No, if business as usual (BAU) remains the norm. BAU involves high rhetoric, photo ops, poor understanding, emphasis on engineering solutions, little accountability, public suffering and apathy.
—Yes, shall obviously require a negation of all that defines a BAU approach and more.
It is not that the governments preceding the current one did nothing. Ganga and Yamuna Action Plans (GAP and YAP) were put into operation as (…)

“Our aim is to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science.” — Avijit Roy
“Dr Dabholkar, who was fighting against super-stition, was assassinated because he was a rationalist. All such people, who have embarked upon a path of reason and rationalism, propa-gated these ideas, had to make tremendous (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
Born on January 2, 1960 at village Butana of Sonipat district, Jagmati Sangwan, General Secretary, All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), may be legitimately acknowledged as a committed social reformer. She had to operate in a State characterised by the paradox of economic development and social regression.
Haryana has been able to emerge as one of the most developed States of the Indian Union on account of the success of the Green Revolution and White Revolution (…)

TRIBUTE
Narayan Bhai was one of the most persistent Bhais from the Gandhian biradari that I have ever met—I dallied a great deal with Gandhians and Gandhian institutions starting way back in the fifties when I joined Vinoba Bhave in his padayatra. Then the whole world of the Patwardhans, including visiting Achyutji in Varanasi, travelling on a train with JP and Prabhaben—all were part of my journey: in and out of the Gandhian biradari. We could not meet Narayan Bhai without a mention of (…)