2017

It was the then Home Minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, who brought the question of Hindi to the fore. This time, it is Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju who has done so. Many people in Tamil Nadu then immolated themselves alive to register their protest. Thank God, it has not come to that stage yet. Nanda had advised the Central Government departments to write notes on the files in Hindi to express their opinion.
The latest is that DMK leader M.K. Stalin has accused the (…)

by V. Mathew Kurian
I. Introduction
The post-Second World War era is considered the ‘age of development’. During this period, the very meaning of the term ‘development’ has undergone great transition. Experts have also enunciated various measurements of development. Multiple actors are there engaging in ‘development’ and these broadly include government and non-governmental organisations and the United Nations Organisation. Though development has many objectives, the central one seems (…)

The usual picture that one would see of Ram would be with Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman, of what is called the Ram Darbar. It was not a tradition to have an isolated picture or idol of Ram. Even the common greeting was ‘Jai Siyaram’, Sita’s name appeared together with Ram’s.
Then came the Ram temple movement. A picture of Ram in aggressive posture, with arrow mounted on the bow, his hairs flying towards back, appeared during Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad converted (…)

I’m a poor mortal dwelling in a city ghetto,
working hard for a living all day long;
what I earn suffices only for daily needs.
Induced by a fellow dweller next door,
I take part in rallies to augment income.
The return is not bad: free transport,
food packet and a fixed amount of money
just for the sit-in till the end of the day.
On rally days I’m taken to the big ground
where I squat with others in an enclosure,
listening to full-mouthed rosy promises,
raising (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Fact No. 1: Donations by companies to political parties is the biggest contributor to corruption in India. All parties acknowledge this.
Fact No. 2: Elimination of corruption has been a top priority with the BJP Government. After the currency demonetisation, government leaders even claimed that black money and corruption had been virtually stamped out.
Fact No. 3: The Finance Bill rushed through Parliament two weeks ago made nonsense of the government’s stated positions. It (…)

COMMUNICATION
Barun Das Gupta deserves our thanks and appreciation for his very thoughtful article, titled “Indo-Bangla Teesta River Treaty: A Human Problem” published in Mainstream dated April 14-20 2017. He has very rightly pointed out that the interests of the farmers and villagers of Bangladesh and India should get equal attention in resolving the dispute.
He is also absolutely right in emphasising that the issue needs to be resolved within a wider framework of improving and (…)

MEDIA
by Shreejay Sinha
This article was written quite sometime ago but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. It is now being published as its relevance has been enhanced in the wake of the recent incidents involving Africans in Greater NOIDA.
Introduction
Africa is the cradle of humanity (the earliest Homo sapiens were found to have lived in Ethiopia), the repository of 30 per cent of the world’s remaining minerals, and keeper of the largest reserves of precious (…)

by Amitava R. Sinha Roy
Newspapers are at an inflection point today as readership habits are changing due to digital adoption being faster than expected. The future of the print media is at stake with big national dailies shutting editions, laying off staff, slashing costs and freezing expansions and investments. Smaller papers have been travelling on this path for quite some time.
A slow but relentless fall in the number of readers, time spent in reading newspapers, advertisement rates (…)

The Westinghouse company’s bankruptcy filing underscores that the entire range of criticism that was levelled by the Left in our country against the Indo-US nuclear deal has been proven right. The people who were lionised by the Indian media for negotiating the deal have gone into hiding. There is a saying that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.
Fundamentally, what went wrong was that a decision was taken by the Indian ruling elites without due deliberation or national (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
It is surprising how intelligent people in politics sometimes take up positions which should logically belong to their adversaries.
The Muslim League in 1940 picked up the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ which a bunch of extremist intellectuals had first coined to back up their demand for Pakistan. Other parties in India rejected it. The Congress made it clear that it did not accept the theory itself though it agreed to the partitioning of the country on the basis of (…)