2017

Trouble has broken out in Sri Lanka over its allocation of land to China for a supermarket and naval facilities. The government in Colombo had moved some shops and business houses from Hambantola to build an industrial zone for Chinese investors.
Last week thousands demonstrated at the inauguration of an industrial zone at Hambantola, as the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and Yi Xianliang, the Chinese Ambassador to Sri Lanka, came there for the inauguration of the zone. (…)

by Purusottam Bhattacharya
On March 25, 2017, 27 leaders of the European Union (EU) gathered at the Italian capital, Rome, to celebrate 60 years of the European project which was literally born from the ashes of the Second World War. It was on March 25, 1957 that the leaders of France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg signed the historic Treaty of Rome which gave birth to the then European Economic Community (EEC) that began its journey on January 1, 1958. Since (…)

One read with great interest the articles of Rosa Luxemburg (Mainstream, November 5, 2016) and Dr Paresh Chattopadhyaya. (Mainstream, Annual Number, 2016) Both bring to light the contra-dictory nature of Soviet revolution and its complexities, which continue to daunt scholars and analysts alike
Nature and Role of Soviets
The origin and evolution of the Soviets and their subsequent loss pf power under the rule of the Communist Party is a rich and increasingly complex task in view of the (…)

by Murzban Jal
The following paper emerged from a seminar on “Pluralism and the Crisis of Identity” organised by Zaheen Ali and Surendra Jondhale at the Mumbai University on March 12 and 13, 2017. The author writes: “I am thankful to them for inspiring me to write this piece.”
Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.
—Karl Marx
There is no Negro problem in the United States.
There is only a white problem.
—Richard Wright
It is not the Jewish (…)

Unburdened by subtlety,
He spews his favourite hate,
Upfront and straight—
Not a tree but a cactus he. Badri Raina

The Shiv Sena (the vanguard of moral policing and culture as seen recently in Kerala) says: “The Muslim Law Board should support the UCC as it will help the community, especially the women to come out of misery.”
The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) or personal law was always a “controversial” one in the Indian polity. Modern India has adopted a common law system as a replacement to Manu’s code, even though most of it remains on paper and in reality many a time equality is denied in legal and (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Digvijay Singh’s tweet ‘Madrassas and Sarswati Shishu mandirs (SSM), both spread hate’ (February 23, 2017) has evoked a lot of response from diverse sections. On the one hand, Muslim groups have taken him to task for demonisation of the Madrassas, and on the other, the RSS supporters have come out attesting the utility of the SSMs and criticising him for comparing the SSMs with Madrassas which are ‘dens of terror’, according to them.
The demonisation of the Madrassas (…)

EDITORIAL
As one writes these lines, twelve days have passed since March 11, when the results of the five State Assembly elections came out. Till date one has not come across any detailed analysis of what went wrong in UP, the most populous State of the country, that the ruling party at the Centre with its allies was able to garner as many as 325 seats in the 403-member House there despite the absence of any perceptible wave among the public at large.
One is not qualified to undertake (…)

A few well-meaning friends with genuine concern about the future of our democratic-secular polity are shocked by the decision of the 325 MLAs of the BJP and its allies unanimously choosing Adityanath (original name, Ajay Singh Bisht, Mahant of Gorakhnath Temple, one of the richest in India) as the CM of the largest State of India. They feel it has happened out of the blue and the BJP’s top brass, specially PM Modi, should not have allowed it as Aditya’s nomination for the CM’s office goes (…)

In making the choice of Yogi Adityanath as the chief executive of Uttar Pradesh in preference to more run-of-the-mill pracharaks, Narendra Modi has made a telling declaration of intent both for the general elections of 2019 and for concerning the reconstitution of the Republic generally. After all, if the record of the Central Government on “development” is anything to go by, the new dispensation in Uttar Pradesh is not likely to move mountains by 2019; thus it is thought best to keep the (…)