2016

These are of course extraordinary times in our country and the former Foreign Secretary M.K. Rasgotra might have for some incomprehensible reason felt the urge to be in sync with the zeitgeist, when he needlessly indulged in some Nehru-bashing at a function in New Delhi on June 13 as part of drumming up media publicity for his memoirs that has been published recently.
According to Rasgotra, Panditji goofed up historically—and the nation has paid a heavy price consequently—when he spurned (…)

by Jayanta Kumar Ghosal
The Hindu fundamentalist forces in India are now very active to destroy the secular and democratic fabrics of our country as enshrined in the Constitution. As a part of their agenda these forces have let loose a cultural offensive which is actually fascist in nature. In this process they have taken Swami Vivekananda as one of their educators and guides. But is this true? Do Vivekananda’s teachings and ideas help the Hindu fundamentalists who have killed Dr Narendra (…)

by Arun Srivastava
The July 11 incident of brutally thrashing Dalits in Una in Gujarat has been different from the earlier atrocities perpetrated against them. This was for the first time the cow vigilantes forced a Muslim boy to thrash the Dalits. Undoubtedly it was aimed at sending the message that even Muslims do not support and sympathise with the Dalits and are anti-beef. Generally the Muslims are supposed to share the economic miseries of the Dalits and the political parties usually (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Bharti Chhibber
Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India by Sanjay Ruparelia; New Delhi: Oxford University Press; 2015; pp. 480; Rs 995.
Several political parties cooperate in a coalition government in Cabinet formation minimising the dominance of any one party in a parliamentary form of governance. The coalition process is generally adopted in cases of hung Parliament when no single political party has achieved majority in Parliament. Likewise a political (…)

by Bhartendu Kumar Singh
Great powers have great strengths! Yet, with almost 70 per cent import of its total weapons’ requirement, India is the world’s largest arms importer since the last few years. This absolute dependency mocks India’s profile as a rising great power, in particular, its military aspect. India remains a laggard and an inconsequential player in the international arms market, being placed at 26 in the list of arms exporting countries. Therefore, the recent induction of two (…)

The following is a write-up prepared by the New Socialist Initiative on Cow Vigilantism. It has been sent by Subhash Gatade who is actively involved in the NSI.
Cow vigilantism, which has received tremen-dous boost since the ascendance of the BJP at the Centre, got its first fitting reply in Gujarat recently. The way in which a self-proclaimed Gau Rakshak Dal—owing allegiance to the Shiv Sena—attacked in Una (July 11, 2016) a group of Dalits who were skinning a dead cow, publicly flogged (…)

TRIBUTE
by Vijay Kumar
Writing is a career of death in a sense; it signifies the absence of the author, and great writing is certainly a gateway to immortality. This is the single greatest and lasting solace for a writer. Mahasweta Devi is no more, but her writing will endure and her place is firmly secure in history.
What makes Mahasweta Devi different from other writers is that she combined her writing with activism anchored firmly in the most sublime dimension of humanism. In this (…)

TRIBUTE
by Sukharanjan Sen Gupta
Arundhati Ghosh of the Indian Foreign Service (1963 batch), who recently passed away in New Delhi, came into prominence in 1971, during the Bangladesh liberation war. On March 25, 1971, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan rose in revolt against the colonial domination and exploitation by the Punjabis of West Pakistan and declared independence. Indepen-dent Bangladesh came into being. The Pakistani rulers unleashed a reign of terror on the unarmed (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The politics of communal and caste polarisation, relentlessly pursued by the BJP from the time it came to power on its own in 2014, is now recoiling on itself. First, the party’s UP Vice-President Dayashankar Singh had to be expelled for his obscene comment in public that Mayawati, the Dalit leader and BSP supremo, was ‘worse than a prostitute’. Even if the so-called expulsion was meant for public consumption in a poll-bound State, it failed to cut any ice with the Dalit (…)

On my grandfather’s sixtieth birthday on July 16th, 1945, the atomic bomb was tested in the USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twentyone days later, on August 6th, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when the USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima. The experiment was immediately hailed in The New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US President Truman said: (…)