2018

by Velayutham Saravanan
This article was sent to us quite sometime ago. But it could not be used earlier for unavoidable reasons.
In the developing countries, competing demand for water with the different stakeholders has increased, particularly during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This competing demand is mainly due to the population growth, agricultural expansion, urbanisation, industria-lisation, domestic water supply and water pollution, and many other factors. (…)

MUSINGS
Now that the government of the day has withdrawn the Haj subsidy, it ought to take another step forward and withdraw the subsidy and support it provides for all the pilgrimages and yatras and melas associated with any religion. After all, in a democracy, religion ought to be kept away from governance. In our country, there is a blatant mix and match, more so in these recent years. There ought to be a complete and immediate halt of this.
Whilst on the Haj pilgrimage I’m of the (…)

by Sardar Amjad Ali
In the present political scenario of the country, the battle the Congress under the leadership of its young President, Rahul Gandhi, with the guidance and inspiration of Smt Sonia Gandhi, is fighting, is certainly a very difficult one. It is a battle, in my estimation, not only against a divisive force in the guise of a political party called the Bharatiya Janata Party but also with its cohorts as well, having a common agenda of a “Congress Mukt Bharat”.
Looking at (…)

by Sankar Ray
Who says the Communist Party of India-Marxist or the Left Front was defeated in the Tripura State Assembly polls in 2018 by the combine of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura?
The overwhelming majority of 2.3 million-plus voters “voted with their feet”, to quote Vladimir Illyich Lenin, who quipped following the collapse of the Russian military machine in World War I, when thousands of soldiers, hungry for days, deserted the Army to return (…)

by Martand Jha
Rahul Gandhi has been elected unopposed by India’s grand old party, the Indian National Congress, as its President. His anointment as the party President brought no surprises to anyone as this was being expected for a long time now. Rahul Gandhi is the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi family to be holding the post of the party President following India’s independence.
His great-grandfather and India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first in the family (…)

In the RSS lexicon, the interpretation of the dualities of ahimsa/himsa and dharma/adharma acquires a meaning, which is arbitrary and subjective, leading inevitably to a militarised view of dutiful religion and of a society of uniform individuals. It creates its own make-believe history to gain strength for its superficial concepts, extremely poor in content. The body of interpretation only creates grounds for a single-meaning discourse, which fashions an unquestioning mass of individuals (…)

Data is being acquired without much thought as to its security or end-use. Take for instance, the National Cadet Corps (NCC) collecting the names, mobile numbers and e-mail IDs of 1.3 million young boys and girls so that the PM can interact with them via the Narendra Modi App. [“For chat with PM Modi, NCC collects mobile, email IDs of 13 lakh cadets”; ; The Indian Express; March 23, 2018]
This will create a database which will enable the PM to interact with “all (NCC) cadets across the (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by M.P. Raju
Common Prophets of the Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus by Bharat Jhunjhunwala; pages: 448; Paperback, Rs 140; 2018; published by Bharat Jhunjhunwala. Available on Amazon.
Can an out-of-the-box hypothesis lead us to truth?—anyone who starts reading the book would naturally be tempted to ask oneself. Jhunjhunwala puts forth a bold new hypothesis that the five early Prophets of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, namely Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham and Moses lived (…)

EDITORIAL
When West Bengal CM and Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee arrived in the Capital on March 27 to hold discussions with several Opposition party leaders, she was speaking about building a non-Congress, non-BJP Federal Front. But on March 28 evening after meeting UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Delhi CM and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal as well as dissident BJP leaders (Shatrughan Sinha, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie) she said: “The country wants us to fight them (the BJP) on the (…)

by L.K. Sharma
National electorates have lost their primacy in deciding the outcome of their elections. They have the vote and they go to the polling booths, but their choice may be determined by a foreign government or a private company. In the new information order, manipulated voters have come to outnumber threatened voters and bribed voters.
Democracy stands diminished as the world debates whether Donald Trump was sent to the White House by American voters or by Vladimir Putin! Not a (…)