2020

Editors Guild of India
October 21, 2020
Editors Guild of India is dismayed at the brazen attack by a Delhi Police official on a journalist of The Caravan magazine while he was carrying out his duty as a member of the press.
On 16 October, Mr Ahan Penkar was reporting on the alleged rape and murder of a teenaged Dalit girl in North Delhi. The teenaged girl’s family and some student activists had organised a protest outside the Model Town police station. The police detained the (…)

by Rosa Gilbert *
Matteo Salvini has failed to capture Tuscany. But as the extreme right becomes more mainstream, the left must make a better offer
“Europe is watching us”, declared La Nazione newspaper in Tuscany, the only Italian leftwing stronghold that the centre-left managed to retain in the 2019 European elections. This weekend, it was on the verge of having its first ever rightwing governor. Ultimately, Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigrant League party failed to capture Tuscany, but it (…)

Table of Contents - Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 44, New Delhi, October 17, 2020 Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Oct. 17 Unconditional Apology | Sumit Chakravartty and AK Biswas The importance of SAARC | Eduardo Faleiro How a Tragedy Gave Birth to the Legacy of M N Srinivas | Jos Chathukulam and Manasi Joseph Maharashtra Governor Koshyari Mocks at the Secular Spirit of the Constitution | Satya Sahu If Hathras Doesn’t Make Us Think Again, Then Nothing Will | Avay Shukla Stan Swami - The Man (…)

Letter to the Readers – Mainstream, October 17
Mehbooba Mufti, the former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has been released from detention after a period of 14 months. She was released just ahead of the October 15 hearing in the Supreme Court of her daughter’s petition which alleged illegal detention. It remains to be seen when all who had opposed abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, dissolution and reorganisation of J&K will be released. We hope that Mehbooba Mufti and all other (…)

The Mainstream weekly (publisher) and Mr A.K. Biswas, a retired IAS Officer and former Vice Chancellor, B.R. Ambedkar University, Muzaffarpur (Bihar) (author) (hereinafter collectively referred to as "we", "our", or "us") hereby fully retract an article ("Mainstream article") authored by Mr Biswas, which was published in the July 1, 2017 issue of Mainstream weekly (print and online) and reiterate that our previously published note ("Readers, Please Note", Mainstream, December 1-7, 2017, page (…)

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was created in 1985 to promote economic development and social progress in South Asia through regional cooperation. Presently, it has eight member countries namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
India was the Chair of the SAARC Summit in 2007 and this was arguably the most productive Summit that SAARC ever witnessed. The launching of negotiations to bring services into the South (…)

by Jos Chathukulam and Manasi Joseph
Abstract
M N Srinivas was a doyen in the field of Sociology and Social Anthropology. The year 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of a fire tragedy at Centre for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University, USA, in which the processed file notes of his 18-year field study in the village of ‘Rampura’ (now Kodagahalli) were consumed by flames. Srinivas, who was pursuing a one-year fellowship at CASBS at that time was planning to (…)

Mocking at the very idea of secularism and the secular State and secular framework of governance enshrined in the Constitution has always been the ideological pastime of BJP and its generation of leaders. They never missed an occasion or rather created numerous occasions to deride secularism and the enduring values associated with it. The Hindutva ideology determines the worldview of BJP and its legacy is carried forward by its leaders and ideologues. Its essence and core content is contrary (…)

10 October 2020
The voters of this country (or at least 37% of them) have given Mr. Modi and his party a long rope. They have kept the faith and have even tolerated the wholesale reneging on his lofty promises. He has not delivered on even one of them- the economy, federalism, relations with neighbours, raising India’s international status, the safety of women, jobs. Instead, the damage caused these last six years has been immense: the country has never before been so divided socially, (…)

In one of those coincidences, the 83 year old Stan Swamy was arrested by India’s high profile National Investigations Agency about the same time that another octogenarian, Francis, was declaring that all men [and women] in the world are brothers, and sisters, with responsibility to each other, and to the earth on which they all live, its resources, its environment, its climate.
Stan Swamy and Francis the Pope are both members of the five centuries old Society of Jesus. The Jesuits, as they (…)