2019

by Navneet Sharma and Anamica
Move your body, Move your bum
Bhole bam, bhole bam, Bhole bam
—A popular song emanating from blaring DJs in Kanwar Yatra
Every year people in and around Delhi and in the so-called ‘cow belt’ wait with baited breath for not only monsoon in Sawan or Shravan but also for the peaceful conduct of the KanwarYatra. This yearly ritual is dreaded because lumpenism and hooliganism run amok on the street and the government not only turns a blind eye to these but (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
To write about somebody whom one has known for more than four decades—sometimes very closely—is not easy after his or her passing away. For me, Bhupesh Gupta was one whom I have known from the early beginnings of my active political involvement in the late thirties.
In the small group of young militant Indians in Britain more than forty years ago, groping for a revolutionary path to the country’s freedom, Bhupesh was perhaps the only one who could really claim to (…)

TRIBUTE
by Beena Sarwar
The following is what Pakistani journalist Beena Sarwar recently wrote in her syndicated column as a tribute to Pakistani and South Asian public figure B.M. Kutty who breathed his last in Karachi on August 25, 2019. She sent it to Mainstream for publication at the earliest.
Early Sunday morning (August 25, 2019) in Karachi, a little over a month after his 89th birthday on July 18, 2019, B.M. Kutty slipped into the ever after. Lifelong activist, trade unionist, (…)

A razing storm is blowing. You face it like an oak tree against its cyclonic speed, but get uprooted in the end.
Or you bend like a willow, letting the storm pass over, again regain your posture, finding foothold on the soil.
Upheavals come, rattle life. How to face them? Is it like a stubborn oak, a lithe willow or both, balanced, blended?
A.K. Das

by Subhash Gatade
Jean Dreze, the Belgian born Indian economist and activist, who has co-authored books with Nobel Laureates like Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, reached headlines for entirely different reasons.
Photo of the placard he was carrying at a protest rally in Delhi challenging the govern-ment’s controversial move to scrap Article 370 really went viral. It displayed stats comparing Jammu and Kashmir and Gujarat, showed how Gujarat lagged behind J&K on a raft of development (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Nikolai Bukharin by Sobhanlal Datta Gupta; Seribaan, Bakhrahat, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal; 2019.
In the post-Soviet collapse period, there has been a growing search for alternatives to orthodox Marxism and for humanist and democratic forms of socialism. The long repressive Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union led to struggle against the gross distortions, questioning the methods totally contrary to the spirit and theory of scientific socialism. The distorted repressive (…)

by Harish Chandola
Veteran journalist Harish Chandola recently lost his son. In the following piece he has written about him. It is being published here for the benefit of our readers. Chandola is a prolific writer with a wide knowledge of developments in countries like Afghanistan and those of West Asia and the Arab world.
Bani (Abani), my son, passed away on Wednesday, August 21, 2019, in a New Delhi hospital of multiple organ failure. The machine monitoring his heart-beat started (…)

by Gopal Krishna
In his “End of ‘Left-politics’ in India?”, Sunil Ray (August 3, 2019, Mainstream) has attempted to develop a critique against the rootless thought of ‘Left-politics’ having lost its relevance to India. It is crystal-clear that “Left-politics” does not begin and end with the fate of Left parties; it rises whenever enough people from “Social Left” engage, mobilise and organise themselves truthfully with concrete social conditions for comprehensive justice, it gets subdued (…)

Renowned scientist and former S&T Advisor to late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Prof Ashok Parthasarathi, 79, passed away at his residence in New Delhi on August 12, 2019 after a brief illness. He leaves behind his wife, Vibha, and sons, Vibodh and Unmesh. Mrs Parthasarathi is a reputed educationist and was the Principal of Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi. Vibodh works in the field of Media Policy and Unmesh, based in Singapore, works in the sphere of Media Business Strategy.
Prof (…)

Editorial
Once again we are approaching another Independence Day, our seventythird. But it will be observed under conditions that are qualitatively different from the ones in the past.
Only recently this month, on August 5, the ruling party of the country by dint of the brute majority it enjoys in Parliament (reinforced as it is by its stupendous victory at the hustings barely three months ago thereby recording its second stint in power) carried out a coup of sorts—revoking Articles 370 (…)