2016

BOOK REVIEW
CALL FOR ISLAMABAD’S TRANSFORMATION TO MAKE IT GOVERNABLE AND FOCUSSED ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Aejaz Ahmad and Zaboor Ahmad
Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military by Hussain Haqqani; Penguin Viking Books; 2016; pages 464.
Hussain Haqqani’s book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military is a straightforward insider’s account of Pakistan that traces how the military and religious groups are acting in tandem to rub each other’s shoulders and explores the nation’s quest for (…)

Several noted personalities passed away in the last few days,
On April 27 veteran CPI-M leader and former Education Minister in the West Bengal Left Front Ministry, Kanti Biswas, 84, breathed his last in Kolkata. He was suffering from diseases related to old age.
Kanti Biswas’ original ancestral home was in Faridpur district of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He migrated to India in 1965 and began residing in the Bongaon region of 24-Parganas, West Bengal. He came in contact with CPI (…)

One out of five persons in the world lives in South Asia. This is also a region where a very large number of farm animals live and where there is a rich diversity of other life forms and their diverse habitats. However, with very serious accentuation of the ecological crisis and science-based prediction of the likelihood of worse to come, human life as well as most other forms of life in the region face unprecedented threats due to man-made factors. While these threats are many-sided, (…)

The India-Nepal relationship is staring at the abyss. It has been on a roller-coaster through the past two-year period of the BJP Government, and of late, hurtling down the hill uncontrollably. A tipping-point is nearing and the famous lines from the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, come to mind: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes unto you.’
Who are the monsters our country is (…)

by Samit Kar
India is now witnessing Assembly elections in five States covering the vast expanse of the country. Of the five States where new governments are to be formed subsequent to the poll, West Bengal is now under a very long election process having seven parts. This shows how the State is now reeling under a depressing law and order condition. Never in the history of electioneering in a State of our country had this experience of the conduct of election segregated in so many parts (…)

by Monaem Sarker
Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Laureate, spent more than 15 years in detention, most of it under house arrest. She was released from her current third period of detention on Saturday, November 13, 2010. Aung San Suu Kyi was born on June 19, 1945 in Rangoon, Myanmar, a country traditionally known as Burma. Her father, formerly the de facto Prime Minister of British Burma, was assassinated in 1947.
Suu kyi’s father Aung San, born on February (…)

EDITORIAL
The second phase of Parliament’s Budget session has concluded. According to statistics, this phase was the most productive of all the sittings since the Narendra Modi Government came to power at the Centre two years ago.
The most significant development of the last few days was the Harish Rawat-led Congress Government winning the floor test in the Uttarakhand Assembly under the supervision of the Supreme Court. It secured the trust vote 33-28 backed as the Congress was by the (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Towards the end of 2015 many writers and eminent citizens returned their national honours protesting against the growing atmosphere of intolerance. The list was long and this acted as a process where some introspection took place in society. Still the ruling dispensation and its associates in the Hindu Right-wing politics, the RSS combine, began criticising those who returned their awards, accusing them of being politically motivated. They were also criticised for doing so (…)

The newly elected NLD Government has now been in power in Myanmar for just over a month. Its historic win in the November 2015 elections was a categorical vote in favour of democratisation and transition away from military rule. Under the leadership of its charismatic leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD was seen as a symbol of change and a harbinger of democratic transformation. There were immense hurdles along the way. The military continued to hold one-fourth of the seats in the (…)

The following is a letter written by Kishenji, a former Central Committee of the CPI (Maoist), who was killed in a so-called eancounter in West Bengal in November 2011. (His full name was Mallojula Koteswara Rao.) The letter was written before his death. It has been translated from the original Telugu by Anishetty Shankar and sent to us from Nizamabad, Telangana for publication in this journal on the occasion of
Mother’s Day on May 8, 2016.
Mother!
Are you well ?
Feople are (…)