2017

Twenty years ago, while presenting his first Budget as the Finance Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh launched “a sweeping set of neoliberal reforms that would dramatically alter the country’s economic landscape. Viewing the crisis as a historic opportunity to ‘build a new India’, Singh argued that it was essential to terminate ‘outmoded’ commitments to Nehru’s economic nationalism. Spouting with gusto French novelist Victor Hugo’s line that ‘no power on earth can stop an idea whose time (…)

COMMUNICATION
India’s independence was supposed to herald a period of economic progress based on equality and justice. So it is disturbing the know that in some respects the levels of inequality now may be even greater than in the colonial days known for their large-scale exploitations and repression.
Some indication of this is available in the recent widely discussed paper titled ‘Indian Income Inequality 1922-2014—From British Raj to Billionaire Raj’. In particular, the data relating (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Testing Time for Non-Alignment • After Menon’s Exit
With American arms flown in in consi-derable quantity, along with defence weapons from other Western countries, the scales of non-alignment are threatened to be disturbed. While the allergy against Western arms has gone even in the case of the Indian Communists—such being the logic of the Chinese invasion of our motherland—the question has come up in a big way as to its impact on our foreign policy itself. (…)

by Shaukat Usmani
The dominant section of the Indian national leadership of the time was frightened with the on- rush of revolutionary ideas pouring from the other side of the Pamirs. This leadership was all along trying to strike a deal with the British Empire and remain or keep the country as a satellite of Britain under the name of the dominion of India. And the young blood stood for militant action against foreign rule; for building up relations with Amanullah Khan and with the Soviet (…)

by Siba Sankar Sahu
‘An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.’ —Albert Einstein
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger globally and by country and region. Calculated each year by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), it was released on October 9, 2017. It reflects India’s unplumbed status on poverty, hunger and malnutrition. India’s rank is 100th out of 119 countries in the world; it slipped from the 55th rank in (…)

by Pradeep Nair
Schools are the most appropriate place to deliver new vaccines to children and adolescents who may not receive them in a conventional healthcare set-up. However, engaging schools in vaccination programmes is not so easy, as the schools have their own administrative and resource limitations. The schools further have day-to-day academic operations and follow an academic calendar where it is very difficult to accommodate a healthcare intervention in between the academic (…)

TRIBUTE
Exactly a month ago, in the morning of September 14, 2017, passed away in New Delhi veteran leader of the print industry Viren Chhabra who has rightly been described as the print industry’s “Bhishma Pitamaha”. He worked for 42 years in The Statesman’s printing department, a journey that began in 1951 when he joined the institution which was then the leading Indian daily in the Capital. He had just returned from London where he completed a technical diploma course from the London (…)

EDITORIAL
As was only to be expected, the Hurriyat Conference has rejected any dialogue with the Centre’s interlocutor.
A week after the Centre appointed an interlocutor to engage all Kashmiris, especially the youth and separatists, the Hurriyat Conference yesterday described the Centre’s move (to appoint Dineshwar Sharma as the interlocutor in J&K as an “eyewash” and said in a statement: “The Centre refuses to accept the ground reality in Kashmir. Sharma’s assertion that he is (…)

by Sankar Ray
The 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China ended its six-day jamboree adding “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” to its Constitution as an ideological addendum to the already lengthy verbiage of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development. Insertion of Xi’s thought into the Party rulebook connotes a leap forward along the ongoing (…)

When great historians write about the past,
They know they must rise above the facts;
Facts are often petty impediments
To the grand vision they wish to enact.
Thus years ago it was boldly writ
In a journal called the Hindu Vishwa,
That Jerusalem was actually Yedushalyam,
Abode of the mighty Yadava
That the Kaaba was a grand Vishnu temple,
St. Paul’s Cathedral a Gopal Mandiram,
Notre Dame a temple to goddess Durga,
And Paris in fact Parmeshwariam.
This was because “in (…)