2018

by Arup Kumar Sen
About 10 months ago, a minor girl of the nomadic Bakerwal community was allegedly gangraped and murdered in a village of Jammu’s Kathua district. This savage act has more or less got erased from our collective memory.
Reportedly, the family of the Kathua girl has “spent four months in the mountainous areas of Kargil district and is now on its way to the plains in the Jammu region, where it will stay for the next six months” during the winter. Having covered nearly 600 (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s press conference in New Delhi today saw his fiercest attack on Narendra Modi on the Rafale deal. Without mincing words Rahul bluntly said CBI Director Alok Verma was removed well after midnight because he was about to begin an inquiry into the Union Government’s Rafale purchase deal. This had caused the PM to panic. The CBI Director was removed unconstitutionally, illegally and criminally at the dead of night, and his office was searched (…)

by Irfan Engineer
The RSS Sarsanghchalak, Shri Mohan Bhagwat, urged the Central Government to bring in a law for construction of the Ram temple at the site where Babri Masjid once stood. Shri Bhagwat was addressing the customary Vijayadashami rally of the RSS. In the election year, the RSS seems to have shed its velvet gloves which Shri Bhagwat had earlier attempted to put on for an image makeover in order to widen its appeal when it had invited the former President of India, Pranab (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Imagine the Pope criticising Jesus Christ. If that is too ecclesiastical, imagine Sitaram Yechury rewriting Karl Marx. Actually we cannot imagine either because the Catholic Church and the Communist Party are rule-bound doctrinaire establishments that do not brook deviations. So is the RSS. Therefore, technically, we cannot imagine Mohan Bhagwat going against the tenets of M.S. Golwalkar, as sacrosanct in the RSS universe as K.B. Hedgewar.
Yet it happened. In his eleventh (…)

by Arup Kumar Sen
The heretical French thinker Michel Foucault transformed our understanding of modern regimes of power. To put it in the words of Julian Reid, “For Michel Foucault the problem of war is the problem of political modernity par excellence.” Reid reminded us in this context that in examining how war is constitutive of modern power relations, Foucault lays down a challenge to the major traditions of political theory and their allied conceptualisations of war. We are further (…)

by V. Bijukumar
The ‘public’ outrage in favour of protecting tradition after the historic verdict of the Supreme Court on September 28 allowing women of all age-groups into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala shows the advent of creeping irrationality in a progressive society and thereby puncturing Kerala’s much-acclaimed modernity. While the cohorts of tradition argue that women’s entry into the temple would be detrimental to the tradition and belief system related to the deity, the (…)

by Ram Puniyani
In a recent judgment, the Supreme Court by a 2-1 majority verdict refused to refer the Dr Faruqui verdict to the Constitution Bench. This verdict had stated that the mosque was not an essential part of Islamic practice. In the recent judgment the dissenter judge felt that the matter needs to be referred to a seven-judge Consti-tution Bench. There was a feeling that “the mosque not being a part of essential Islamic practice” might have had an impact on the 2010 Allahabad (…)

by Annapurna and Navneet Sharma
There are so many hungry people. To them God has no other shape than bread.—Mahatma Gandhi
India has recently crossed France to claim the sixth spot of being the largest economy and has also made a deal for Rafale fighter jets worth sixty thousand crore rupees with France. With these jets we are going to protect the largest number of hungry people in the world and the largest number of farmers who commit suicide. In this article we wish to emphasise that (…)

by L.K. Sharma
During a festival celebrating the Goddess who kills a demon menacing Gods, scores of educated Indian women have unmasked their tormentors and sparked a mini-revolution.
It has led to resignations in the media world, boycotts in the film industry and the closure of a famous film company. Junior Foreign Minister M.J. Akbar was made to resign. A journalist has compared these #MeToo revelations to the “eruption of a volcano”.
These women had for years suppressed their trauma (…)

Souls are freshly baptized in the purse; Lords of Capital allow all things But prying human converse.
A pall of brainless sameness Suits Capital best; Watch out for the one who dares to put The nullity of sameness to test.
Dictators are happiest When Capital and Faith embrace To snuff out the heresy of thinking Beyond the baubled race.
Capital and Faith are satiate When noise and obedience reign, When we are the arms of the octopus, Slave to a single marauding brain.
Are Capital and (…)