2016

I am past the half-way mark between sixty years and seventy, but I did not until recently hear the expression “anti-national”, which is now flying around like a swarm of maddened bees. Just what might it mean?
In accepted usage a “national” is a person who belongs to a nation, a citizen; but “anti-national” has nothing to do with this. Would it not make a damn sight more sense to use “anti-nation” as an adjective and apply it to nouns like “person” and “action”? We could leave “an (…)

A Delhi High Court Bench headed by Justice Pratibha Rani gave bail to Kanhaiya Kumar, the President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, on March 2 quoting a Bollywood song. The bail order began with a stanza from a song from the film Upkar, whose last two lines were:
Mere desh kii dharti sonaa ugle
Ugle hiire moti mere desh ki dharti.
It would have been entirely appropriate if the judge was alluding to Kumar as a national treasure in that reference. He is, no doubt, an (…)

Should students take part in politics was the question even before independence. This same debate raged when I was studying law at Lahore. We would skip classrooms on the call of Mahatma Gandhi or some other national leaders to show solidarity with the independence struggle. The agitation was against the British rulers and it never struck us that we were missing studies.
Even when Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, raised the slogan for a separate homeland for the Muslim community, (…)

The turmoil in the Jawaharal Nehru University (JNU) and the caste war in Haryana are bound to attract a lot of attention abroad. When the government projects India as the ‘fastest-growing big economy’ of the world, it whets outsiders’ appetite in a world steeped in recession and bleak outlook, especially in the Western countries or China that are unabashedly looking for market openings for their exports. So, developments in India that impact on its political or social-economic stability (…)

by Aijaz Ashraf Wani and Mehragud Din Bhat
Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the founder of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (PDP), passed away on January 7, 2016 at the age of 79. He was the 12th Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Born on January 12, 1936 in the Bijbehara town of district Anantnag he graduated from the S.P. College in Srinagar and went on to obtain a degree in Law as well as a post-graduate degree in Arab History from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).
Mufti (…)

by K.M. Ajir Kutty
Dr N.A. Karim, a prominent public intellectual of Kerala, breathed his last in the afternoon of February 4, 2016 at Manjari, his residence at Peroorkkada in Thiruvananthapuram. He had been ailing for some time and had just had a bout of viral fever after which he refused food and grew very weak. The end came at 2.15 pm on the fateful day. People from all walks of life, among them were a number of well-known personalities including Ministers, political leaders, writers (…)

by Purusottam Bhattacharya
Britain faces a crucial test for its role in European and world affairs for a generation to come when the UK votes on an in-out referendum on June 23 to determine whether it will continue to be a member of the European Union which it joined in 1973 after a prolonged and agonising debate about its place in Europe. Long-term UK watchers will feel a sense of de- ja vu as the present situation is almost a replica of what happened in 1975 when the Labour Government of (…)

Economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s latest book, The Country of First Boys, is a collection of essays on an array of topics, ranging from development, justice, and education to calendars, Rabindranath Tagore, and the importance of play. In an interview with The Hindu, Prof Sen spoke candidly about the need to prioritise human security and not just national security, the controversy that has dogged the Nalanda University, and, drawing inspiration from Adam Smith, the need for an (…)

by Paresh Chattopadhyay
We read with considerable interest Sen’s interview with the Hindu (The Hindu, December 24, 2015: Amartya Sen, ’National Security is one component of human security’). Here again this eminent humanist, unlike many in the profession, shows in unambiguous terms his concern for the oppressed and the downtrodden and his pronounced sympathies for the Left. However, there are some particular points made in the interview with which, unfortunately, we are unable to agree. (…)

EDITORIAL
The release of Kanhaiya Kumar, the President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, on March 3 after three weeks of detention in police custody and prison and his electrifying speech the same evening before a packed audience of JNU students in the university campus have created a veritable stir across the country and beyond. This is testified by the massive spontaneous response to his JNU address in the social media.
Indeed Kanhaiya has in simple language (…)