2017

As a train approaches an important station, there is a spurt of activity, particularly mobile phone calls, as passengers confirm about the car coming to pick them up. Even if they are not going to their home, most passengers are confident about where they will go at the end of a long train journey. But more often than not there are also some passengers who do not even know where they’ll go in the big city. Imagine coming to a crowded city without any confir-mation of where you can stay or (…)

by Shaukat Usmani
According to the decisions of the Third Congress of the Comintern a new university came into being in Moscow. This was then commonly known by the abbreviated name of the KUTV.
It got contingents from India (the Indusky Kurs section), from China, Indonesia, from all nationalities using Turkish language, and many others from the Far East.
The Indian and Chinese students were living in adjoining rooms in the same hostel. And there was complete amity between the students (…)

Harris Khalique, a poet and essayist, is the author of Crimson Papers: Reflections on Struggle, Suffering, and Creativity in Pakistan. He has remained associated with labour, minority and women rights movements. He was recently interviewed on behalf of the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle by Shail Shams. It is being reproduced with due acknowledgement.
DW: What impact did the Russian Revolution have on anti-colonial movements in British India?
Harris Khalique: I find it interesting that (…)

by Vivek Kumar Srivastava
This year completes hundred years of Mrs Indira Gandhi’s birth. She was born in the year of the Bolshevik Revolution and died when the chain of orthodox Bolsheviks was on the decline. Her age existed almost with the Russian Communism and she witnessed and dealt successfully the most tumultuous phase of modern history, the age of the Cold War.
Her ideology of action was human-centric which found support from socialism; she was also the first economic reformist as (…)

by Sheel Bhadra Kumar
On November 19, 2017, we have celebrated and marked the birth centenary of late and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This is also an appropriate moment to reminisce about her political actions, her struggle against hostile political odds and her contributions to the making of India. But before recollecting those, let us discuss the current terminologies being hotly debated but reminiscent of the Indira Gandhi era. They are popular and populism. Etymologically a (…)

by G.K. Goswami and Siddhartha Goswami
Abstract
Surrogacy may potentially result into genetic bewilderment because of diffused parentage if the gamete donors are not known. In the absence of known parental pedigree, forensic tools like DNA may not be able to establish an individual’s identity, causing difficulty in the execution of national and international laws. This forensic void may attract transnational criminal syndicates to exploit surrogacy and produce tradable ‘designer (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The mass hysteria created over the film Padmavati is acquiring dangerous dimensions. A BJP hothead of Haryana has announced a reward of Rs 10 crores to anyone who will behead the film’s director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and mutilate the face of the film’s heroine, Deepika Padukone. He has also threatened West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee that the same fate will befall her as befell Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister. Mamata has, as was to be expected, dismissed the (…)

Justice Rajinder Sacher, Senior Member, National Executive, Socialist Party (India), and Dr Prem Singh, President, Socialist Party (India), have in a press release stated the following.
The Preamble to our Constitution specifically states that India is a Secular Socialist State. The Supreme Court of India has held that “Secularism” is the basic feature of our Constitution and any State Government which fails in upholding this basic feature has no right to continue. In fact in the Bommai (…)

by Ram Puniyani
The politics of communal polarisation is focusing on many identity issues, one being the Love-Jihad, where a Hindu girl married to a Muslim or Christian man is targeted, and is legally manipulated in a manner to ensure that she is forced to be sent to her parents or to ‘anti-Conversion clinics’. There is some public knowledge about Hadiya and the bogey of Love-Jihad, spiced up with recruitment for participating in Jihad in Syria. Still, the cases of the likes of Swetha, a (…)

Political parties all over the world have come to be closed shops. What is known as the ‘High Command’ usually dictates who will be installed as the President. Rahul Gandhi has been ‘elected’ as the Congress President. The outgoing chief, Sonia Gandhi, saw to it that her son would occupy the top party position.
I had seen the change in the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom from close quarters when I was India’s High Commissioner at London in the nineties. Mrs Margaret Thatcher was (…)