2017

Mazhhar Ali Khan Ali Khan, a legendary journalist who never flinched from uncompromising journalism, upholding the sanctity of the freedom of press, was born on June 6, 1917. He married Tahira Hyat Khan, daughter of Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, Prime Minister of Punjab, in colonial India. Sir Sikandar was the younger son of Nawab Muhammad Hyat Khan of Wah. The Hyat family belonged to the Khattar tribe of Attock, North Punjab. Educated at school in Aligarh under the then Aligarh Muslim University, (…)

Mahatma Gandhi is dead. The world has been deprived of the sight and sound of his frail body and aged voice—the body and voice that had in the last few months almost lost, for a large section of mankind, their personal and emphemeral character and become timeless symbols of compassionate love and fearless rectitude. As the man who first ploughed the arid wastes of Indian politics in the pre-nationalist period, the man who husbanded the seeds and saplings, only recently come to fruit and (…)

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Naxalite movement is being observed, old memories come crowding in my mind. One unforgettable memory is that of meeting Charu Mazumdar, the leader of the Naxalite movement, at his home at Siliguri in north Bengal. It was November 1968. I was working with the Bengali newsweekly Compass, started by the eminent communist revolutionary of undivided Bengal, Pannalal Das Gupta. North Bengal had then been struck by a devastating flood. I was sent to cover the (…)

Looking back at the ‘spring thunder’—the ecstatic definition of the historic Naxalbari struggle by the Radio Peking in mid-1967—after 50 years from many angles is a reflex of historical consciousness. There’s no denying that the battle had for the first time focused on the imperative for agrarian rights for the landless labour. Dozens of essays, published in English and other languages, mostly are in dearth of the angle of detachment, a must for any historio-graphic exercise. Among them the (…)

The following piece appeared in this journal on July 18, 1992 to mark twentyfive years of the Naxalbari movement. On the fiftieth anniversary of the same struggle it is being reproduced for the benefit of our readers. The author, then the Associate Editor of Mainstream, now edits this weekly.
Twentyfive years ago, in the first half of 1967, was born a spark which, in the words of Beijing Radio quoting Mao, promised to set the prairie on fire. History will pronounce its final verdict on the (…)

Yours is the face I saw in a procession.
All day
I searched for you
and then at dusk I found you
sitting in my home
resplendent
beside the lamp.
Refusing me all day
you held me close at night.
In that terrible heat
I found no shade anywhere;
the blue seas had all dried up
I rub my eyes.
Did I see you in my dreams?
Or are you mere illusion?
Hold me close in your arms
let the frozen tears
of my heart
melt.
Give my love a place to be born
while I
tie the (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Ahmad Zaboor
Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan by Hein G. Kiesling; Harpercollins India; 2016; pages: 307.
Writing about the intelligence agency is the most uphill task given their secretive protocols and apprehensions of infiltration jeopardising their working. But Hein G. Kiesling has taken up the most daunting job of writing about the Pakistan intelligence agency—better known as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI was established in 1948 and is (…)

EDITORIAL
The Narendra Modi-led BJP Government at the Centre has completed three years and the party leaders are busy projecting their dispensation’s “achievements” in these three years.
The real “achievement”, of course, is in the sphere of social relations. A deliberate endeavour has been made for the last three years to turn our secular, pluralist country into a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. Remember, how Mohammad Aklaque and Pehlu Khan had to lay down their lives before savage attacks (…)

by Shamsul Islam
According to press reports, one of the RSS offshoots, Garbh Vigyan Sanskar (Uterus Science Culture), following the Vedic preaching and post-World War II experiments in Germany, is conducting live trials in many parts of India for producing ‘fair’ and ‘tall’ ‘customised’ babies. According to Dr Hitesh Jani, convenor of the Arogya Bharati, another outfit of the RSS which is part of the project, “If the proper procedure is followed, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser (…)

by Ram Puniyani
The RSS agenda of Hindu Rashtra draws heavily on the superiority of the Aryan race and greatness of Brahmanical values. The ideology constructed by this organisation tells us that Aryans are the superior race. The whole foundation of the concept of the Hindu nation as the teacher-leader of the world derives from the twin and inseparable notions of the racial theory, promoted by the British, and Brahmanism, clothed in the language of Hinduism. This came to the fore once (…)