2018

by Arun Srivastava
After many years India is witnessing the emergence of a farmers’ movement albeit not in the classical form of the earlier farmers’ move-ments or peasant movements of the seventies. But at some level it heralds the message that the farmers are no more ready to be carried away by video-clipped success stories of the capitalist agrarian economy.
It is really a matter of concern that no serious effort was made in recent years to find the reasons for discontent and (…)

by Irfan Engineer
The first part of this two-part article appeared in last week’s Mainstream (December 1, 2018). This is the second and concluding part.
In the previous issue of Mainstream (December 1, 2018) we briefly outlined the tension between rights of denominations or any sections thereof under Article 26 of the Constitution to manage their own affairs in matters of religion, and to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purpose on one hand and rights of (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Human Rights Day is observed on December 10 every year commemorating the day, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark the occasion we are reproducing the following article N.C. wrote twentysix years ago.
Human Rights: Basic Issues
The government’s decision to set up a National Human Rights Commission is a significant indication of its being able to read the signs of the times. The Prime Minister has (…)

by Aishwarya Bhuta
“Abhito haur naam badalne hain,” (more names are yet to be changed) proclaimed Yogi Adityanath even before he was named the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that his Cabinet has approved the proposal of renaming the historic city of Allahabad as Prayagraj. Barely three months ago, in August 2018, Mughalsarai Junction in UP was rechristened Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction after the RSS ideologue. Faizabad is now to be known as (…)

Renaming cities and places is nothing new in world history. The socio-political context of its happening is important. Catherine Epstein in her book, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), drew our attention to what happened in Poland under Nazi occupation: “Throughout Nazi-occupied Poland, Poles were deemed to be second-class persons... They lost all property rights and were subject to a special, stringent criminal code... Nazi policies in western Poland offer a primer (…)

by Shrabana Barua
With the rebalancing of the Asia strategy of the Trump Administration, Indo-Pacific as a term began to overlap with that of Asia-Pacific. Though broadly both these terms roughly point to the region east of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, there are fundamental differences between the two that India should not overlook. While Asia-Pacific has an economic overtone to it, Indo-Pacific has evolved within a strategic context and can be said to be a concoction mostly of the (…)

A public meeting was held at the Constitution Club on Saturday, December 1, 2018 to discuss the worrisome trend of anti-terror laws being used to stifle democratic dissent by harassing civil rights lawyers, poets, writers. The meeting was called by the group of petitioners who had approached the Supreme Court in the matter of the arrest on August 28 of persons alleged to be “urban Naxals” (Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Arun Fereira and Vernon Gonsalves). Their petition, (…)

Hon’ble Home Minister,
We understand from news reports that under instructions from your Ministry, the intelligence agencies, have prepared a State-wise list of several organisations and individuals, who are sympathetic to the Rohingya refugees in India and are providing assistance to them. According to the news story published in The Pioneer (November 19), the list includes the names of a former Ambassador, top lawyers, civil society members and a professor of a renowned university as (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
by Ramneet Kaur
When we refer to the concept of reproductive choice, it means women’s right, control and choice over their reproductive abilities. The right to decide whether they want to have a child or not, the control over their bodies, and the choice of refusing or accepting motherhood.
But, when we think about women’s right, control and choice over their bodies in a patriarchal country like India, these terms appear more of a question than an answer to one of the (…)

IMPRESSIONS
What’s happening to our country? A huge and diverse land of 135 million people, 29 States and 22 scheduled languages, yet we are caught in a single obsession—religion. All discussions, all decisions, all policies are shaped by religion. Sabarimala is on the edge of civil war. “Hindus are losing their patience,” a Union Minister tells the Supreme Court after it postponed the Ayodhya case hearing. Uttar Pradesh changes Allahabad into Prayagraj. Soon Azamgarh will be Aryamgarh, (…)