2017

A close look at the inaugural speech by US President Donald Trump and the outline of the various key plans of his administration that has been published immediately afterward on the White House website on January 20 amply bears out the basis of the cautious assessment in Moscow in recent weeks that while a steady revival of Russian-American relationship is within the realms of possibility, difficulties will remain and there needn’t be any illusions about radical changes.
For a start, (…)

by L.K. Sharma
The reports of America’s decline are exaggerated. The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) proved it. The POTUS—the President of the United States—matters. Donald Trump got mentioned in several sessions. It was yet another victory for Trump. Hovering as a spectre over a literary festival in a distant land is a great achievement, beyond the President of Mongolia and the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
If Donald Trump did not tweet about the Jaipur Literature Festival, it was (…)

Francis Fukuyama, the celebrated Japanese-American intellectual, who saw the end of the Cold War as the “End of History” but a “Clash of Civilisations” as the next stage, has explained the accession of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States as “the rise of an American strongman (being) actually a response to the earlier paralysis of the political system”.
The thesis also applies perhaps to the rise of another outlier, Narendra Modi, to the top of the pole in India. While (…)

When the distinguished writers and artists return to the Academies the awards which had been conferred on them, the question to ask is not why they did not do so earlier, say, at a testing time like the Emergency. Writers and artists are a sensitive lot. They react when they feel like and how they feel like.
It is, in fact, the duty of the government to find out why they felt that the situation had come to such a pass that they had no alternative except to return their awards. Nayantara (…)

by l. Mishra
Let me begin with a historic introspection.
“O mother! Why is it that I am black when everybody else around is white? The angels, the Tarzan, the little stars who twinkle are all white. The President’s residence is called ‘White House’. Why is this infatuation with white? Why is it that black represents evil while white represents all that is good and holy? Why should I join the American army to fight the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War (1958-73)? War entails a lot of bloodshed (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
The following lines were written by N.C. twentytwo years ago and published in this journal’s February 18, 1995 issue. It is being reproduced on the occasion of the distinguished revolutionary Kalpana Dutt’s twentysecond death anniversary which fell on February 8 this year. It came and went with hardly anyone remembering her on that day. Kalpana’s birth centenary on July 27, 2013 also went virtually unnoticed. But we in Mainstream have decided to offer our homage to her (…)

After having some serious hiccups last year in its long march to a market economy with Chinese characteristics, the synod of the top Mandarin bosses has confabulated for resuscitating the second largest sagging economy of the world by mid-December in their annual stock-taking of the national economy. They call it ‘supply side’ reform thus not altogether rejecting the supply side economics in the style of Milton Friedman but introduce some serious tinkering into it. The reform is aimed at (…)

A judge of the Bombay High Court recently gave bail to three men who were charged with a murder committed in the presence of eye-witnesses. Here is part of the judgment, which looks not at facts but at presumed motivation:
“The fault of the deceased was only that he belonged to another religion. I consider this factor in favour of the applicants/accused. Moreover, the applicants/accused have no criminal record and it appears in the name of the religion, they were provoked and have (…)

A controversy erupted recently when Narendra Modi’s photo appeared behind the charkha in a calendar of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission where people are used to seeing Mahatma Gandhi. Some Modi supporters are asking why there was no contro-versy when Modi used broom, also a symbol taken from Gandhi, for his Swachch Bharat campaign. After all, Gandhi spectacles appear on all Swachch Bharat publicity material.
Gandhi has no monopoly over either broom or charkha. Anybody has a (…)

by Sanjal Shastri
The year 2016 has been a testing year for Turkey’s relations with the European Union (EU). With Austria’s Foreign Minister threatening to freeze talks regarding Turkey’s EU membership bid, irreparable damage might be done to the relationship between the two sides. Turkey, a land that is described as a natural meeting point between the East and the West, is increasingly finding itself out of favour in Europe. This commentary attempts to look at the possible fallouts of the (…)