2016

MEDIA
by Santosh Kumar Biswal
The recent attack of cow vigilantes on Dalits in Gujarat’s Una and East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh has again shaken the entire nation and the amount of media coverage it has attracted is being questioned as usual. Atrocities after atrocities on Dalits are occurring at regular intervals. Hence, the debates on the modus operandi of the functioning of the media continue unabated
Una, which has the highest the number of villages of all the talukas in (…)

by Garga Chatterjee
September 2016 is witness to an apocalyptic dress-rehearsal where the mainstream media is egging on two nuclear-armed governments for “action” and “reaction”. Humans all over, especially those in the subcontinent, need to sit up and take note of whatever it is that masquerades as the media. After the Uri attacks, there is talk of action and retaliation in the air and even more so in the airwaves. Did the Indian Army jawans die for nothing, some ask? There’s something (…)

by Mohd. Afsar
“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of (…)

The guns on the Line of Control have not yet fallen silent, but arms vendors are coming to Delhi. The Reuters reports that US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter will pay a quick visit before moving on to his next job. (Reuters)
A think-tanker, Jeff Smith, Director of Asia Security Programmes at the American Foreign Policy Council, told Reuters: “The (US) administration is eager to get as much done as is humanly possible. They believe the conditions and the personnel in both capitals (…)

by Ram Puniyani
In the din of hysteria created around the military action on the LoC, which was in response to the killing of 18 Indian Army jawans in Uri, the issue of anguish of the people of Kashmir has been undermined. As such India-Pakistan skirmishes (September 2016) are mostly centred on the issue of Kashmir. On one side India’s claim is that Kashmir is an inseparable part of India and no power on earth can separate it from India. Pakistan, on the other hand, raises doubts about the (…)

by p.c. jain
Kashmir has been a thorn in the flesh of India since 1947. Just after independence soldiers in the garb of infiltrators attacked Kashmir in order to bring pressure for the accession of Kashmir to Pakistan. On the request of the then ruler of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, to India to help to fight the infiltrators, India after the accession of Kashmir to India sent its troops to fight the infiltrators. The Indian forces saved Srinagar from falling into the hands of the (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
While there is no doubt a lot on which to attack those in authority for their dereliction in running an orderly system of governance, one has to ask at the same time why there has been such an appalling deterioration in social conscience in most of our public activity. In other words, the corrosion of values in public life is not confined to Ministers and top bureaucrats, but has become all-pervasive, the pollution of morals seem to choke out public service.
If we (…)

by arun srivastava
Believing in Marxist ideology and imple-menting it are two different issues. An individual may be an ardent subscriber to the Marxist ideology but he would find it tough to practise the ideology. Marxists in India do not strictly adhere to the basic tenets of Marxism while imple-menting it in the Indian scenario. The failure of the Indian Communists and Marxists is generally viewed in the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union and it is said that with this Marxism (…)

by samit kar
The recent historic judgement passed by the Supreme Court on the Singur issue has made the Left suffer a terrible blow yet again. After a 34-year stint in West Bengal, nothing seems to be on the right path for them. Subsequent to 2011, the concept of the ‘Left Front’ seems to be de jure instead of de facto. The CPI-M is the scapegoat now as they did amass unbridled power when they were in office. The landmark judgement is, no doubt, historical regarding the question of land (…)

At the start of Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s indefinite dharna at Singur on August 24, 2008 on the issue of returning 400 acres of land outside the Tatas’ Nano car project (which land is to be used for setting up ancilliary industries) to the peasants from whom it was forcibly acquired, Medha Patkar delivered a speech the gist of which appeared in Dainik Statesman. The following is a rough English translation of whatever appeared in Dainik Statesman (in Bengali) for the benefit (…)