2015

Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia’s most flam-boyant and exotic liberal Opposition leaders and Russia’s first President Boris Yeltsin’s one-time favourite and heir-apparent, was shot dead on February 28 night at a stone’s throw from Moscow’s iconic Red Square behind the Kremlin walls. Nemtosov was returning home at midnight walking with his 23-year-old female friend, Anna Duritskaya, a model from Ukraine, after having dinner with her in a restaurant situated in the famous departmental store, GUM. (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Nirupam Hazra
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama; Publisher: Profile Books, New Delhi; 2014; price: Rs 699; pages: 658
It is difficult to put Francis Fukuyama in a single category—a philosopher or a historian or a political thinker. In his first book, The End of History and the Last Man (an expanded version of his 1989 essay published in The National Interest), Fukuyama argued that (…)

Dear Friends,
Perhaps I should not address you like this, yet feeling concerned about media reports, which I wish to be proved false, about internal bickerings in the AAP, I am doing so.
The Indian society is going through very hard times, despite the AAP’s spectacular victory in Delhi Assembly. The AAP brought some hope in fighting these hard times and reviving the spirit of the freedom struggle days against British colonialism. Today’s neo-colonial, neo-imperial system is much worse (…)

Would it not be nice if, in fact, You did not set aside that one Charitable day to propitiate us, But simply, through the year, Internalised our human status. Would it not be nice if you Understood how, lacking us, Your brood would have no Existence, not to speak of Swagger, muscle, puissance. Would it not be nice if, in fact, You came alive to the infinite Beauty of our complimentarity, Finding fulfilment and grace In our answering disparity. Would it not be (…)

COMMUNICATION
PM Narendra Modi’s new avatar as a high-handed, know-all self-promoting man with a tinge of arrogance was responsible for the fast deterioration of his so-called charm among electors. After all, votes like alms are is to be sought for with humility—which was missing with Modi and his team. Modi seems to have fallen into the same ‘shining India’ trap of the erstwhile flamboyant Vajpayee and is hence getting more and more distant from the real India. Voters—high or low, rich or (…)

EDITORIAL
The Budget session of Parliament has begun with the Opposition mounting a fierce attack on the Treasury Benches on the new Land Acquisition Bill the BJP-led NDA Government has introduced in the Lok Sabha on the lines of the Ordinance on the subject the Modi dispensation had promulgated in a bid to substantially erode the major provisions of the Land Acquisition Act that came into force following the passage of the relevant legislation in both Houses of Parliament during the UPA (…)

a noted poem by the National Poet of today’s Bangladesh, Begum Sufia Kamal

In retrospect, the Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi, would have done better, achieved a thousand times more, and helped India’s cultural integrity, unity and amity—and therefore its prosperity—by the simple visual action of putting on a Muslim prayer-cap, delicately crocheted in white cotton thread, in front of the global TV news cameras. Mr Modi need not have gone to a Jumma Masjid, or even to a meeting of Mr Modi’s favourite Muslim leaders in Gujarat, or a private function at the (…)

by Arun Srivastava
The Manjhi-Nitish break-up in Bihar has indeed come as a surprise as this would dent the “clean” image of Nitish Kumar, the Chanakya of Bihar, and also decimate the tenets of his renunciation of power eight months back. No doubt the relationship between the two was based on purely political compulsions. But it has much wider ramifications/implications. Undoubtedly Nitish had played the biggest gamble of his political life by choosing Manjhi as his successor but it was (…)

Like most of his predecessors, Sri Lanka’s new President Maithripala Sirisena chose to make his first official visit abroad to India in mid-February, thereby reinforcing the special relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.
Though the visit was thus the latest manifes-tation of a tradition, it was also vested with several exceptional features. It came at a time when India-Sri Lankan relations had dived headlong, having raised a number of uncomfor-table questions about the (…)