2018

EDITORIAL
Last week African nationals staying in the Capital were subjected to wanton attack once again. According to reports, two Tanzanian women and two Nigerian men were hounded by a mob in the wake of rumours that they had kidnapped a local boy and even ‘eaten’ him, an allegation which was ultimately found to be totally false. Thankfully they were rescued on time before they could suffer physical assaults leading to grievous injuries. Such attacks on Africans in the National Capital (…)

Rising inequalities in wealth and income lead to unequal access to power, status and influence. Democracies may be less prone to such state capture than dictatorships but even democracies have proved to be vulnerable to pressures from the powerful private interests, particularly when the prevailing social structure is inequitable, as in India.
Policy-analyses, worldwide, highlight rising income inequalities as the foremost concern today. Recent OECD evidence based on a sample of 15 (…)

There is public opposition to the Government of Karnataka (GoK)’s proposal to construct a 125-ft high statue of Mother Kaveri in the immediate vicinity of the iconic Krishna-rajasagar (KRS) dam, along with some other constructions including a “Disneyland” enter-tainment park, at a cost of Rs 1200 crores. Reportedly, a Cabinet decision resulted in government officials scouting the area to identify the land required to be acquired for the project.
Such “wish-list planning” is typical of (…)

by Vijay Kumar
Ever since the Gujarat Assembly elections held in December 2017, the Congress party under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi has been on the resurgence. The Congress missed the formation of the government in Gujarat, the home State of the Prime Minister and the President of the ruling party, the BJP, by a narrow margin. Thereafter, the Congress did well despite anti-incumbency, and succeeded in outsmarting the BJP in May 2018 by installing a government in Karnataka led by H.D. (…)

by Sardar Amjad Ali
The Indian National Congress, a party of distinction and heritage, fought the battle of liberation of India from the foreign yoke of 200 long years. With a heritage of Gandhi-Nehru-Indira’s association, the party, since 2014, has been under a most heinous attack, as a party of irrelevance in the Indian contemporary political history, by the mainstream media of the country. Their main contention is that a party, having 130 years of descent, could secure only 44 seats in (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Banning of books, opposing cricket teams and singers from Pakistan are not very new in India. We had seen the banning of the Satanic Verses, digging of the cricket pitch in Wankhede Stadium of Mumbai to oppose the Indo-Pak match, disruption of the ghazal programme of Ghulam Ali in Mumbai amongst many others. The intensity of this intolerance has grown by leaps and bounds in recent times. The music programme which has been targeted this time is that of T.M. Krishna, the (…)

by Irfan Engineer
This is a two-part article. This is the first part. The second and concluding part will be carried in the following week’s issue of Mainstream dated December 8, 2018.
Traditions and customs are being used to redefine and redraw the contours of secularism in India in the last couple of years. The constitutional parents, with near unanimity, if not unanimously, embraced the principle of secularism and that principle was followed in the initial years of the (…)

November 27 this year marks the twentieth death anniversary of P.N. Haksar, the eminent administrator and distinguished diplomat as well as one of the country’s foremost thinkers. He was the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and a Member, UN International Civil Service Commission. On this occasion we offer our sincere homage to the abiding memory of that towering personality, by reproducing the following written by him and published (…)

The story of Hashimpura massacre in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh (UP), committed more than three decades back, has come back to the public domain after the recent verdict of the Delhi High Court, which sentenced 16 Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel involved in the massacre to life imprisonment. There are different narratives of the massacre. “One theory is that the killings were retribution for the murder of Prabhat Kaushik, a young Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh worker who had died of a (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Early next week, on October 31, the country would be observing the tenth death anniversary of Indira Gandhi who had been cruelly shot down on this very day by her own security guards right inside her residence.
By all accounts it was a ghastly tragedy committ6ed by those who had been embittered by the ‘Operation Bluestar’ at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The perpetrators of Indira’s assassination owned up the full responsibility for their gory deed which in their (…)