2017

by Murzban Jal
The imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. —Rabindranath Tagore.
For the last year-and-a-half after the JNU incident, many reflections on the malfunctioning of universities have been articulated mostly from the liberal democratic framework. Such reflections work on the binary: liberalism=good/authoritarianism= bad. While such binaries seem to be ever present in the cranium of the liberals, what (…)

EDITORIAL
We have observed yesterday the twentyfifth anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, an incident in post-independence India that—like the assassi-nation of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 and the Gujarat genocide of 2002—was not only a blot on our much-cherished secular democracy but actually shook the very basis of our republic.
Indeed a day after the demolition of the mosque on December 6, 1992 activists of various persuasions owing allegiance to secularism had marched to the BJP (…)

On December 2, 2017 most newspapers flashed a front-page story that the Bharatiya Janata Party had swept the urban local bodies’ elections. Pictures of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath offering sweets to one of his Deputy CMs or the State BJP President and all of them displaying victory signs also accompanied the report.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The BJP has actullay been routed in these elections having managed to win a mere 18.7 per cent of all seats whereas the Opposition, (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Jawaharlal Nehru showed the judiciary its place when he said in the Constituent Assembly in 1949: “No Supreme Court can make itself a third chamber. No Supreme Court and no judiciary can stand in judgment over the sovereign will of Parliament. If we go wrong here and there, it can point it out, but in the ultimate analysis, where the future of the [country] is concerned, no judiciary can come in the way. And if it comes in the way, ultimately, the whole Constitution is a (…)

by Prem Singh
This comment is about the situation that has arisen after the split in the Janata Dal (United). The comment is made by me as a citizen with a socialist background, and not as a member of the Socialist Party (India). The National Election Commission of India has decided in favour of Nitish Kumar’s faction on the party symbol dispute. The Sharad faction, however, has gone to petition the High Court in order to challenge the decision of the NECI but is simultaneously engaged in (…)

by Arun Srivastava
In three separate violent incident at least three Dalit youths were recently thrashed in the Gujarat villages by the Rajputs for “sporting moustache”. Humiliating and thrashing Dalit youths in Gujarat for sporting moustache by upper-caste people is a new element in the long drawnout tactics to assert might through coercive and violent means. An insight into the atrocities of Dalits in the State points to the fact that a serious endeavour is on to make Gujarat a Hindutva (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Human Rights Day is observed on December 10 every year commemorating the day, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark the occasion we are reproducing the following article N.C. wrote twenty five years ago.
The government’s decision to set up a National Human Rights Commission is a significant indication of its being able to read the signs of the times. The Prime Minister has made the eloquent claim about (…)

The following piece, which was published as ‘Political Notebook’ in Mainstream (December 12, 1992), is being reproduced on the twentyfifth anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Its significance is heightened due to the ongoing offensive of the Hindutvavadi forces following the seizure of power at the Centre by the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah-led BJP in May 2014. — Editor
The vandalism that brought down the Babri Masjid structure on December 6 will remain a Black Sunday in (…)

On December 6, the demolition of the Babri Masjid would be 25 years old. Instead of making amends for what the Congress Government did in 1992 with the connivance of the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party Government is bent upon building a temple at the site where the Masjid stood once.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has made a statement that only a ‘grand temple’ would be built in Ayodhya and nothing else. This is unfair to the Muslims or the liberals who (…)

by Prabira Sethy and Rakesh Kumar
Introduction
India has been pitching for a permanent seat since 24 years in the expanded membership of the United Nations Security Council arguing that the existing body does not truly reflect the contem-porary world realities. India—along with Brazil, Germany and Japan—has formed the Group-4 to press for speedy UNSC reforms and their inclusion in the powerful organ of the world body. India’s demand for a permanent seat in the UNSC with veto rights is a (…)