2015

The Paris carnage of Friday, November 13, could have been a consequence of the Islamic State’s (IS’) major losses in its war in Iraq in the previous month of October. The IS possibly wanted to demonstrate that it is still a force capable of hitting targets of its choice, in spite of those defeats.
The Iraqi Army on October 7 had succeeded in retaking Ramadi, the capital city of the Sunni Anbar province, west of Baghdad. It also took control of the critical Abu Farraj bridge over the (…)

The Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy’s clean sweep in the November 8 elections in Myanmar surprised those who thought that the embers of the 1990 outcome had finally died down. The NLD had stormed those elections as well (if anything, less emphatically) but had been set back by their annulment by the military junta and the house arrest of their all-in-one Burmese “face” and mass leader, at home in Yangon and at Oxford, or Delhi where she did some of her schooling and of (…)

well under two years of its rule, the BJP Government appears to be fast losing its steam; by all indications it has started huffing and puffing. Before that it found little difficulty in whipping up sentiments in its favour in its tempestuous ascendancy in the Indian masses’ imagination. The ground then was fertile enough for the saffron seeds to sprout into a crop of wild dreams that caused the voters to take the spurious for the genuine. The “fiftysix inches of chest”-brand of wishy-washy (…)

I. Introduction
The seriousness of climate change and the urgency of related adaptation and mitigation actions are by now scientifically well established. Despite this, its significance in terms of basic changes needed at the policy level has not percolated to the level of governments. This is certainly true of the agricultural policy in India where, despite additions in the form of some new climate change-related initiatives, the overall policy appears to be along the lines of ‘business (…)

The British establishment must have prevailed upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to mention Kohinoor during his official visit to the United Kingdom. Otherwise, it is not under-standable why he did not refer to the subject even once directly or indirectly.
Why I suspect the British Government’s hand is because of my personal experience. When I raised the subject in the Rajya Sabha after my campaign at London, the then Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, told me that I was ‘spoiling (…)

by Navneet Sharma and Pradeep Nair
Ram naam sat hai
The above sentence literally states a divine matter of fact that the Ram (the God) is the only universal truth but obtains a very different meaning in practice, usually chanted by people while following someone on his/her last journey to the cremation ground. This article attempts to appreciate how Ram as a name and a concept attains totally different meanings. The same Ram, when used in a political discourse, also can mean very (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Maqbool Fida Husain is at the very centre of a storm whose after-effects are extremely relevant for our democracy—both for the democratic structure of our state and for the preservation of democratic values in our society.
It is not that Husain is at the centre of a controversy for the first time; in fact, it is seldom he is out of one. He has got thousands of fans, not all because of the beauty of his art but quite a large number applauding him for what would have (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Inside Chhattisgarh: A Political Memoir by Ilina Sen; Penguin Books India; 2014; pages: 307; Price: Rs 399.
This is an extraordinary book, based on an unusual life-journey, rooted in search of solidarity and democratic transformation of society. It is unfortunate that Ilina and Binayak Sen have been in the national and international limelight because of the trumped-up Binayak Sen case and the subsequent “Free Binayak Sen Campaign” which was, of course, very positive. This (…)

MUSINGS
Whilst the 2002 Gujarat pogrom was peaking, I was attending a Governing Council meet of one of the colleges here in this Capital city. Seated next to me was a woman lawyer who later became one of the spokespersons for the BJP ... Towards the end of that meet, she asked me what I thought of the news reports on the killings in Gujarat. Quite obviously I didn’t mince words and told her rather too bluntly that more detailed reports should be out, naming-nailing the murderers—that is, (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The entire West, led by the United States, has vowed to wage a ‘fight-to-the-finish’ battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Terrorists of the ISIS made a bloodbath of the innocent in a series of acts of butchery in Paris on November 14, killing 129 persons and wounding several hundred. French President Francois Hollande has called it ‘an act of war’ and declared a state of emergency in his country following the attack.
The ISIS today controls a vast (…)