2020

by Rajarshi Majumder
Coming from a sleepy provincial steel township where things ran like clockwork in tune with the sound of the clarion from several public sector giants that dotted the landscape, our idea of eating out was limited to the only Madras Cafe in the locality. The fare offered did not demand much time to decide – it was either Dosa, Masala & Sada, Idli with Sambhar, and Vada, Sada or dipped in Sambhar. So ten years back, when after a leisurely dinner at an upscale (…)

by Suhas Borker
Kapila Vatsyayan (1928-2020) was a scholar-practitioner of the arts, a cultural thinker and an institution builder.
Kapila Vatsyayan, the grand matriarch of culture studies and a preeminent practitioner of the arts, passed away on September 16 in New Delhi. She was 91.
Her life was a saga of a scholar-practitioner of the arts who became a legend in her lifetime. She was beyond categorisation as a scholar, dancer, linguist, author, ethnographer, educationist and art (…)

Мой Cтив (My Steve): A personal recollection of Stephen F. Cohen, who died on September 18 at the age of 81.
by Katrina vanden Heuvel
I first “met” Steve through his 1977 essay “Bolshevism and Stalinism.” His cogent, persuasive, revisionist argument that there are always alternatives in history and politics deeply influenced me. And his seminal biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, challenging prevailing interpretations of Soviet history, was to me, and many, a model of how (…)

by Christian Rakovsky
(First published in Bulletin of the Opposition (Bulleten Oppozitsii), No. 6, 1929, pp. 14–20.
Another translation entitled Power and the Russian Workers, appeared in The New International, Vol. I No. 4, November 1934, pp. 105–109.
Transcribed and marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.)
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Dear Comrade Valentinov,
In your Meditations on the Masses of 8 July, in examining the problems of the “activity” of the working class, you (…)

Table of Contents Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 40, New Delhi, September 19, 2020 Letter to the Readers - Mainstream, Sept 19, 2020 The marginal & the Mainstream | Rrishi Raote (2012) Tribute: Raghuvansh Prasad Singh - A committed socialist | Prem Singh Realities Beyond The Peacock Moment | TJS George Impunity isn’t exactly popularity | Jawed Naqvi C Achutha Menon: Communist Aspirations in India | V Raman Kutty Essaying The Muslims | Anil Nauriya (…)

Mainstream weekly has had a long journey. Its first issue in print appeared on September 1, 1962. It has appeared week after week non-stop ever since except for short period during the Emergency of 1975-77. It was closed for a brief period at the end of 1976 and it reappeared once the elections were announced in 1977.
It crafted a space on the national scene as an independent progressive magazine among the thinking people of India and was available at major public libraries across the (…)

the career of Mainstream, the weekly news journal started by intrepid journalist Nikhil Chakravartty, on the occasion of its 50th year

TRIBUTE
It is an undeniable fact that today’s corporate India is intoxicated with the idea the digital. It is constantly on the fast-track to transform all into the digital, and as quickly as possible. In such an environment, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, popularly called as Raghuvansh Babu in friendly circles, sent his hand-written resignation addressed to Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on September 10, on plain paper. Lalu Yadav too wrote the answer on plain paper, by (…)

IMPRESSIONS No prime minister has imprinted himself on Indian history as effectively as Narendra Modi has done. Such has been his dominance that when history comes to be written, his years in power will be known as the Modi Period, not the BJP Period.
One reason he will outshine his party is the importance he has always attached to projecting himself as a leader unlike any other. Self-projection always runs the risk of over-doing. Fortunately for Modi, he has no rival in (…)

September 15, 2020
IT’S a common error of perception to confuse political impunity with popularity. The distinction makes a big difference in understanding the core features of fascism, which have mostly eluded South Asia. Ziaul Haq’s recourse to public flogging in Pakistan did strike terror in many hearts but he crucially failed to win over the people. Pakistan acquired all the accoutrements of a fascist state, except the missing popular support. Other Pakistani dictators have been shown (…)