2018

by Vijay Pratap
Lohia’s Non-Congressism
Non-Congressism was born out of the imagination of a political leader who died on October 12, 1967 at the age of fiftyseven, when his dreams were still alive. Dr Rammanohar Lohia had put forward the idea that all Opposition groups should come together to provide an alternative to the Congress.
For Lohia, it was not an easy task for many reasons. The Congress had not exhausted all its moral and political potential. Opposition parties like the (…)

COMMUNICATION
With the passage of time the serious vacuum left behind by the sudden and arbitrary dismantling of the Planning Commission is being felt more and more. The Niti Aayog was neither meant to fulfill the important role of the Planning Commission nor can it be expected to do so. Hence the demand for the re-establishment of the Planning Commission should be raised strongly by more and more Opposition parties, and they should include this demand and issue firmly in their future (…)

EDITORIAL
The mystery surrounding superstar Sridevi’s untimely demise—manifest in the UAE authorities’ “comprehensive investigation” that resulted in inordinate delay in the release of her body—is finally over with the Dubai Police telling Indian diplomats that they “did not suspect any foul play”. The body arrived in Mumbai last night and this afternoon her last rites were performed in the city by her husband. Thus all speculations in the media regarding the cause of her tragic (…)

by Sanjay Mishra
Introduction
After allegations of corruption and favouring two businessmen for the Rajya Sabha seats over a founder member and a popular leader of the party, Kumar Vishwas, the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP’s) winter of worries only got worsened in the ‘Office of Profit’ (OoP) case. The party, of course in keeping with its wont, has been seemingly caught on the wrong side of the law in the OoP case and, with about two years still to go for the end to the tenure of its rule in (…)

TRIBUTE
At a time when the voice of justice and social concerns is getting weaker in the media, the sudden departure of Neelabh Mishra, Editor of National Herald, at the age of only 57 is extremely tragic. He will be dearly missed by a large number of friends not just in the media but perhaps even more so among social activists and civil liberties activists. He along with Kavita Srivastava made an important contribution to many important social causes.
Neelabh wrote several important (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Political tendencies not only distort and ‘present the past’ to suit their political agenda; they can go to any extent to even lie about the events and their interpretation. ‘Facts are sacred; opinions are free’ should have been the dictum for all those commenting on them, but as they say for the likes of Modi, ‘all is fair in love and war’. To promote his personal ambitions and to enhance the impact of his political agenda, he has been crossing all limits. At one level in (…)

The judiciary in Bangladesh is so much under pressure that it is difficult to believe the five-year sentence given to former Prime Minister and Opposition leader Khaleda Zia is genuine. The judges are on the run because of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s reported annoyance with them. One judge has gone abroad but may not return because he is said to be in the bad books of the Prime Minister. Understandably, the judge fears some action against him if and when he lands at Dhaka. In fact, almost (…)

by Shiraz Sheikh
Here is a tale of two countries not only with shared genesis but also with divergent experiences of regime types. At one end is India which was built with pluralism under a democratic leadership and with inheritance of the colonial state apparatus. It successfully spread the branch of procedural democracy and is proud of being the largest democracy in the world. On the other end is Pakistan that suffered from structural discontinuity coupled with dearth of political (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
In 1967, that is, more than fifty years ago, N.C. visited the Kashmir Valley for a few days and held detailed discussions with a wide cross-section of opinion-makers and political personalities of all shades there. On his return he wrote a series of pieces on Kashmir in Mainstream. The following is the fourth and last instalment of the series ‘Special Report on Kashmir’ and was published in this journal’s November 18, 1967 issue. It is being reproduced now that Kashmir (…)

The world of finance is a world of mystery. The common man is not in a position to understand its intricacies. In the age of domination of finance capital under neo-liberalism, financial scams constitute the new face of plunder. The latest addition to the list of financial scams in India is the one engineered by Nirav Modi.
The main bank involved in the Nirav Modi fraud case, Punjab National Bank (PNB), reported a steady slide in its profitability over four of the last five years, and the (…)