2018

by Anupama Souri Das
Introduction
The commoditisation of higher education has gained acceptance in recent years. Profit, which was supposed to be illegal in education, has now legally entered into higher education. There has been a paradigm shift in the Twelfth Five Year Plan of higher education for “For-Profit Institutions”. The Twelfth Five Year Plan has favoured an approach that will endorse private capital in higher education with an eye on profit generation.1 Subramanian notes how (…)

by Shamsul Islam
India, sadly, is witnessing the Hindutva juggernaut running amok crushing whatever was democratic, liberal and egalitarian in the Indian polity. The RSS, as the charioteer, is not ashamed of this vicious campaign; instead, it is taking credit for it. It was not long back that it used to claim apolitical status. Even when its cadres like Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani became rulers of India it would assure the nation that the RSS was a socio-cultural organisation and (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
November 7 this year marked the 101st anniversary of the October Revolution. To commemorate that occasion we are reproducing the following piece written by N.C. in Mainstream fiftyfive years ago on November 9, 1963 recalling his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1956 (to witness the celebrations in the Red Square on the thirtyninth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7, 1956).
Lights of Moscow
As the IIyushin-14 touched down on the hard crust of the (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by K.S. Subramanian
Ocean of Melancholy: The Tragedy that was Karbala by Mir Mosharraf Hossain; Niyogi Books, New Delhi; 2018; Price: Rs 395.
The battle of Karbala in Iraq in 680 CE was a watershed in the historical development of Islam and gave birth to two leading sects of the religion: the Shias and the Sunnis. It is of vital importance to Indians, especially the Hindus, to understand the real causes of the battle and the historical consequences that it had.
The novel (…)

by Atanu Sengupta and Sanjoy De
Introduction
TheNobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences was started from 1969. It was a rather late realisation of the donors of the prestigious accreditation. Controversies arose from the beginning. Some said that it was a resonance of the power of modern world that yields in its best form in the discipline called Economics. In a way, it seems to rehabilitate the Foucaultian concept of knowledge as power. Others, who were less critical, argue that the (…)

by Mohammad Ashraf Khwaja
Robert Thorp, a British Army officer, is believed to have visited Kashmir as a tourist in 1865 when Maharaja Ranbir Singh was the ruler of the state. A theory is being developed by some ‘Thorp sympathisers’ that he was allegedly murdered in November 1868 by the forces of Ranbir Singh for his crime of speaking against the Dogra autocracy. It is said that his mother was a Kashmiri Muslim woman who had been married to E. Thorp after the latter converted to Islam. (…)

COMMUNICATION
On October 2, the Gandhi Jayanti Day, nearly 25,000 landless rural workers and adivasi peasants from various parts of India assembled at Gwalior and a huge meeting on land-related issues was organised as a part of a wider mobilisation of people to demand much better and stronger implementation of land reforms.
Keeping in view the extremely important role of land reforms for reducing rural poverty and ensuring sustainable food security to the most vulnerable sections, there (…)

by Shubham Kumar and Shubham Patel
“I am what I am, so take me as I am.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1. Introduction
Transgenders, as defined in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India (NALSA), are “male and female cross-dressers (sometimes referred to as ‘transvestites’, ‘drag queens’ or ‘drag kings’), inter-sexed individuals, and men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, whose appearance or characteristics are per-ceived to be gender atypical. In its broadest (…)

EDITORIAL
As the air quality in the Capital touches “severe” levels with a toxic haze hanging over Delhi with citizens residing in the National Capital Region experiencing burning sensation in the eyes, nose and throat, October 31—an important landmark in our history—has passed off silently across the nation. This year the date marked the 143rd birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who, as the first Union Home Minister of independent India, played such a pivotal role in (…)

COMMENTARY
After more than 31 years justice has at long last been delivered in the 1987 Hashimpura massacre of 42 Muslim men who were shot dead in cold blood by policemen belonging to the UP Provincial Armed Constabulary. What is noteworthy is that the Delhi High Court has overturned the trial court’s acquittal of the policemen in 2015 and 16 of them have been sentenced to life term in prison. This is quite a departure from what has become the norm over the years thereby perpetuating the (…)