2016

Freedom at Stake
(for Prof Nandini Sundar)
Now it is the creed to rape women And kill the villagers, Make room for the new India Steeped in himsa.
Gouge hillsides for the mining, Clear pathways for the felling, Make way for all the natural resources To be stripped and shipped, For the ‘Make in India’ story.
The tale gets more gory, When a few academics Go to record the voices of the villagers, They get implicated in a murder (it matters little that they were fifteen hundred miles (…)

EDITORIAL
Eight years ago when Barack Obama won the US presidential election in a historic victory over the Republican candidate, John McCain, he captured the whole world’s attention in an unprecedentedly eloquent acceptance speech at Chicago on November 4, 2008. That speech remains etched in one’s memory not only because of the exceptionally brilliant address but also due to the emotions it evoked: tears streaming down the face of Reverend Jesse Jackson while listening to Obama with rapt (…)

Veteran Subedar Ram Kishan Grewal, aged 70 years, unhappy at the government not providing OROP to Veterans, committed suicide by consuming poison in Delhi on November 2, 2016.
OROP had been the focus of intense agitation over many months at Jantar Mantar in 2015, and the government prevaricated and dodged the core issue, with PM Narendra Modi, RM Manohar Parrikar and FM Arun Jaitley making different, often conflicting, always confusing, statements on OROP. It all began with the BJP’s prime (…)

by Shrikant Wad
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, had a historic win in the general elections of 2014 in India. It has com-pleted two years successfully. This essay is an attempt to analyse the ideological influence of the BJP on the present-day Indian society, more specifically on an individual Hindu-Indian voter, using the disciplinary knowledge base of Public Administration. In the liberalised, modern economy of India, it is pertinent to understand such an (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
November 14 this year marks Jawaharlal Nehru’s 127th birth anniversary. On this occasion we are reproducing the following editorial by N.C. published in the Mainstream issue that came out on the third death anniversary of our first PM. Thereafter we are carrying excerpts from Nehru’s speeches, writings and interviews that are highly relevant in the current Indian scenario. Some articles on Nehru published at different times in this journal and a couple of pieces (…)

I have no love for bigotry and dogmatism in religion, and I am glad that they are weakening. Nor do I love communalism in any shape or form. I find it difficult to appreciate why political or economic rights should depend on the membership of a religious group or community. I can fully understand the right to freedom in religion and the right to one’s culture, and in India specially, which has always acknowledged and granted these rights, it should be no difficult matter to ensure their (…)

It was in 1936 that I first met Panditji. I was in my second year at Cambridge and he had come to Europe in connection with the serious illness of his wife, Smt Kamala Nehru.
At that time he also came across to England and down to Cambridge and met us, the Indian students there.
Our family had known Pandit Nehru for a long time because when Panditji was at Cambridge, my father and mother were studying at Oxford but unfortunately since I was educated in England from 1927 I personally did (…)

Gandhiji was the one man who played the most important role in building a secular India. Both Gandhiji and Nehru were secularists, but their approach to secularism was different. While Gandhiji was essentially a religious man, Nehru was not religious. But he wanted people of different religions to live in this country in peace and harmony. He was essentially a modernist with a tremendously broad outlook, and therefore he often felt that the rituals and the dogmas and the prejudices and the (…)

You do not have to be an idol-worshipper to remember Nehru today. Every day something happens that compels your mind to recall a man exerting every nerve to pull his countrymen out of the morass of superstition, to debunk the ‘bullock-cart mentality’ and to instil in them the confidence that they could shape their own destiny. He was a man far above his peers, loved and adored by the millions, respected and honoured the world over as the passionate voice of peace and freedom; a man who could (…)

by Sukumaran C.V.
“The alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance, and it yields the most abnormal kind of illegitimate brood...the combination of politics and of religion in the narrowest sense of the word, resulting in communal politics is—there can be no doubt—a most dangerous combination and must be put an end to. This combination is harmful to the country as a whole.”
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Independent India has miserably failed to put (…)