2019

Is white psyche racist? Hitler’s industrial ‘final solution’, Eliot’s unsuspecting line: ‘Gentile or Jew’ in the Waste Land, Trump’s taunting tweet: “let ‘em leave, let ‘em leave”— all hinted at its outer texture.
Is there a prejudicial worldview? It sounds so, flying in the face of racial diversity. Yet all colours: white, brown, black, mingle together, building below the crust a coalition— binding, uniting rainbow of races.
A.K. Das

by Anup K. Sinha
This year the Union Budget was, for all practical purposes, presented twice. The first time it was in February 2019 as an Interim Budget which seemed exactly like a full-fledged annual Budget. The next time it was after the parliamentary election results were out. The second time was the full Budget for 2019-20. The two budgets were very similar in one sense: both were in large parts political rhetoric that appeared to have come out of a party manifesto. To understand this (…)

Jallianwala Bagh massacre was committed on April 13, 1919 when people had gathered to celebrate the Baisakhi at Amritsar, Punjab. This article pays homage to the innocent and peaceful men, women and children who unsuspectedly fell victims to senseless firings of the colonial authorities. They were martyrs of the Indian freedom struggle.
That the colonial rulers had awarded as compensation a sum of Rs 22,66,732 for the savagery inflicted upon an assembly of men, women and children—Sikh, (…)

by Amin Sofi
Never to learn lessons from a long list of mistakes it already stands accused of having committed in Kashmir, the Government of India is at it again, repeating those worn-out tactics which have singularly failed to achieve even a semblance of peace and normalcy in Kashmir. Whether it involves looking at the K-issue exclusively from a security perspective that is entirely of our neighbour’s making, a law and order problem exacerbated by a lack of development on the ground with (…)

by Ranbir Singh
The BJP, which had obtained 34.18 per cent votes and won seven out of 10 seats from Haryana in the 2014 parliamentary elections, has been able to get 57.93 per cent votes and win all the 10 seats in the 2019 parliamentary elections. This quantum jump of the party both in terms of the vote-share and the seats won may be understood if we keep in view the following factors:
In the first instance, it has to be primarily attributed to the charisma of Modi’s personality created (…)

by Atanu Sengupta and Sanjoy De
Recently there has been much hue and cry regarding the publication of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data. It has been a signed documentation of 108 eminent economists and social scientists that lay bare the supposed intention of the present Central Government in playing a hide-and-seek game with important information that the nation demands. The document was substantiated by similar withholding of important information in the field of (…)

by Gautam Sen
One more gory instance of assault and depredation against the deprived and the dispossessed of India has come to light. This was a July 6, 2019 incident concerning a 35-year-old Scheduled Caste (SC) woman of poor means, being forcibly taken to a police station at Sardarshahar in Rajasthan‘s Churu district, raped while in detention in a police custody, brutally assaulted by the guardians of the law to the extent of having her nails plucked out, beaten in the presence of a (…)

by Swami Agnivesh
The predicament of minorities in every society has to be understood sensitively and wisely, especially by themselves. On the whole, this is not the case. Religious minorities tend to live ghettoised, in a parasitical sort of relationship with the putative mainstream. It needs to be reckoned here in passing that ‘mainstream’ itself is a problematic category, often artificially constructed through a political process, more pronounced in democracy than in any other type of (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
After forty years of the foundation of our independent republic, the Frankenstein has appeared again—the monster that is out to destroy democracy and plunge this nation into civil war that shall rend asunder thousands of towns and villages of this great country.
The term, communalism, does not convey the gravity of the crisis that confronts us today—let it be bluntly stated that what we face today is the demon of Hindu-Muslim hatred. Over a large part of this land, (…)

by R.G. Gidadhubli
The 19th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit (SCO) was held on June 14, 2019 in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Kyrgyz President Sooron-bai Jeenbekov, and the leaders of other SCO member-states—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, and Pakistan—participated at the Summit. It was attended by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The focus of the summit was to expand cooperation (…)