2017

The good news from the India-Pakistan boundary is that it is calm. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has said in an interview that “the temperature has come down on the border”. This could mean that India and Pakistan seem to be settling down to a relationship which was expected 70 years ago when partition took place.
If this is the case, both countries should cut down on the defence expenditure. We have not introduced the real cut which, at present, is only marginal. Unfortunately, the (…)

by Santhoshkumar, R. and Neethu, S. Kumar
A number discussions and suggestions were made from various parts of our country in relation to modifying, implementing and introducing API (Academic Performance Indicators) Score in Higher Education. Actually it will help to improve the quality of the higher education system in our country. However, some people have confusion in the proposed system. Because the proposed present API score-system is not properly followed in all universities in our (…)

by Pradeep Bhargava and Anant Ram Mishra
As the elections for the Legislative Assembly are in progress in Uttar Pradesh, the diversities in people’s lives and their contradictions come into play. A majority of people are subsistence farmers and labourers, some small artisans and service providers working their own tools, mostly primitive; we call them living in subsistence times. Then there are some goons, thekedars and power brokers whose religion seems money and they live in money times. (…)

by Pradeep Nair and Sandeep Sharma
City is not a new phenomenon. Civilisations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Indus Valley had a rich culture of urban life. However, not more than ten per cent of the population of these civilisations used to live in cities. (Modelski, 1997) Cities were dependent on villages to meet their everyday needs. They were geographically small and less populated as compared to the modern cities. Urban life was not much different in the cities of these civilisations (…)

by O.P. Jaiswal
To understand the present political dimension and development, as well as Narendra Modi’s victory and the BJP’s rise to power driven by the dynamics of an unprecedented development promise, a campaign aided by corporate money power and a strong communal polarisation, these dynamics, clearly manifesting in different forms and as different challenges, cannot be glossed over. One will have to explore the ancient literature of India’s past, as the apex body of the BJP, the RSS, (…)

by Saeeda Diep and Sandeep Pandey
The Indian Government has decided to increase the seats at the stadium on the India-Pakistan Wagha-Attari border, where a joint beating-the-retreat ceremony is held every evening, from 5000 to over 13,000, at an estimated cost of Rs 24 crores.
Every evening, the Pakistan Rangers and Border Security Force (BSF) of India practice a coordinated exercise and lower their flags before closing the gates on the respective sides. The drill starts with the (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Taisha Abraham
Daughters of Jorasanko by Aruna Chakravarti; Harper Collins; 2016; 344 pages; Price: Rs 399 (paperback).
Daughters of Jorasanko by Aruna Chakravarti, set during the time of the Bengal Renaissance, is a sequel to her earlier novel, Jorasanko, the ancestral home of the Tagorefamily. Jorasanko essentially talked about the pioneering Tagore women. Set between the years 1859 and 1902 it delineated the gradual change from the feudal to the liberal mindset and (…)

by FAYEZAH IQBAL
We live in strange times for sure,
Newspapers demand our attention galore to endure..
the bizarre blots of sins and subjugation,
filling the voids of love-seeking, and peace-loving creation.
I flip through the pages to ensure there comes a day, that has no stories of human lives going amiss,
But I sob inside seeing rapes, homicides, and hate crimes only getting more brisk.
I come across news of minor girl being raped, killed and thrown like an everyday refuse; (…)

EDITORIAL
It is a foregone conclusion by close observers of the national political scene that in the ongoing elections for the Assembly of the country’s most populous State—Uttar Pradesh—the ruling party at the Centre, the BJP, will not able to repeat the landslide victory that it was able to register in the Lok Sabha polls in mid-2014, that is, roughly two-and-a-half years ago. The party had then bagged as many as 71 out of the State’s 80 Lok Sabha seats and its ally two more making the (…)

Six months prior to the 2017 Assembly elections the battle for power in the North Indian State of Uttar Pradesh was seen as between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) led by Mayawati and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is presently ruling at the Centre. The BJP’s chances had slightly dwindled after its State Vice-President Daya Shankar Singh made some inappropriate comments against the Dalit leader of the BSP. At this point the Samajwadi Party, the party presently in power, was predicted (…)