2016

From N.C.’s Writings
May 3 marked the 120th birth anniversary of Vengali Krishnan Krishna Menon, the former Defence Minister of India (popularly known as V.K. Krishna Menon). Unfortunately the anniversary went largely unnoticed. He was born near Calicut on May 3, 1896 and passed away in New Delhi on October 6, 1974. On this occasion we are reproducing the following piece from N.C.’s “New Delhi Skyline” written in Mainstream (December 3, 1966). This was written in the context of the ongoing (…)

Vengali Krishnan Krishna Menon (1896-1974) whose 120th birthday on May 3 this year quietly passed by, unobserved and unremem-bered, is now an almost forgotten hero—or villain, according to one’s perception. Krishna Menon stood like a rock by the side of Jawaharlal Nehru when the Right in India was consoli-dating and challenging Nehru’s leadership, and especially his foreign policy, which had three component parts — fostering friendship with the Soviet Union and China, keeping consciously (…)

by K. Vikram Rao
Indian’s most unforgettable Defence Minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, was not remembered in his homeland on his 120th birth anniversary on May 3. But his old friends met at the Nehru Centre in London and talked about his views on public libraries. Menon had said in 1932 that there should be as many libraries and commu-nity reading rooms as there were pubs. Reporting Krishna Menon, I found, required special skills. He spoke 150 words a minute on an average and we correspondents (…)

The following piece was written sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. So some points made here are dated. Yet given the importance of the issues raised in the overall context we are publishing it for the benefit of our readers.
Ten years back, the in-house journal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had carried an article —penned by none other than the incumbent Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar who was heading the America Division at that time—passionately (…)

All defence deals have inbuilt commission which is paid to those who purchase arma-ments. The Congress party, after getting power soon after independence, used the money to fight the elections. Babu Jagjivan Ram, the then Defence Minister, managed the funds, not letting the deals becoming a scandal.
The uproar today is over the kickbacks over and above the usual commission. Now even the defence specifications are changed if the money paid is substantial. This happened in the case of VVIP (…)

The Nation Wants to Know
That there are many issues which agitate the minds of the people is beyond dispute. But the minds of elected representatives in State and Central governments appear to be agitated on election issues or matters related to them, rather than the major issues which affect the daily lives of the majority of Indians. If newspaper headlines are an indication of what interests readers and those who make the news which is in headlines, it would appear that the Agusta (…)

by Ziauddin Chowdhury
The dastardly killing of secular elements of different occupations (but mainly bloggers) by extremist fanatics in Bangladesh has roused public opinion in that country. We are reproducing, with due acknowledgement, the following article from Dhaka Tribume by a noted analyst for the benefit of our readers.
In 2007, Maulana Fazlullah, leader of a Frontier-based militant Islamic organisation known as Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (who later became the leader of (…)

by Anindita Ghoshal
Bangladesh was the third country in a row to come out of a nation-making process from a colonial state to an independent one (1947-71). Nationalism played a major role in the fight against colonialism and in shaping up the political boundaries of these states, India- Pakistan-Bangladesh. Yet, the nature of conflicts as well as issues of negotiations and necessities behind the creation of separate states in this geographical area of unified India had changed time and (…)

by Monish Kumar Babbar and Sandeep Pandey
The Indian Institutes of Technology Council, headed by the Minister of Human Resources Development, Smriti Irani, based on a recommendation by its Standing Committee, has decided to increase the undergraduate fees from Rs 90,000 to Rs 2 lakhs per year. This now makes IIT education costlier than some of the private engineering colleges. Although this is being done in the name of achieving greater financial autonomy, if this is not privatisation of (…)

COMMUNICATION
Marx used the category “primitive accumulation” to characterize the violence associated with the birth of capitalism.The “robbery of the common lands”, “expropriation of the agricul-tural population from the land” and the “usurpation of...clan property, and its trans-formation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism” were “just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumu-lation”. It should be mentioned in this connection that Marx argued in (…)