2020

The last three decades have witnessed unprecedented conflict within and among nations, and religion has often been misused and invoked to justify sectarian strife. The United Nations which was created “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” sees interfaith dialogue and cooperation as an important step toward global harmony.
The United Nations Summit on Religions convened in the Millennium Year felt that all religions offer helpful means to advance the cause of justice, (…)

As a retaliatory measure consequent to ‘Galwan Valley’ aggression, the Government of India invoked Sec.69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and banned 59 smart phone applications which include the most popular ‘ TikTok’, ‘Cam Scanner’ etc. The reasons cited was that these apps pose threat to sovereignty and integrity of India as per credible inputs received by the government.

by Arun K. Sinha
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, (…)

Full Table of Contents - Mainstream, June 27, 2020 LETTER TO THE READERS - COVID 19 Lockdown Edition No.14 Why China’s Finger Points at Ladakh: Imperatives for India | Maj Gen S.G.Vombatkere From the Archives: extracts from the story of Mainstream’s Journey Through The Emergency From The Archives: The Roots of the Emergency | Nikhil Chakravartty [Video: Super Crisis Lies Ahead] | Patrick Bond (9 June 2020) Splintered but not broken: A history of Israel’s independent left | Matan Kaminer and (…)

Letter to Readers Mainstream, 27 June 2020 - Lockdown Edition no 14 Forty-Five years have passed since the midnight of June 25 - 26, 1975, when the infamous National Emergency was imposed on India by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi –- suspending civil liberties, introducing pre-censorship on printed materials, newspapers and publications, and outlawing protest -– marking a big rupture in our political system and damaging our parliamentary democracy. Following the emergency, the anti-congress (…)

Mao Zedong, first president of the People’s Republic of China, had designs on “reclaiming” territories to the west of China, by placing the “Chinese hand” over the region. Tibet was likened to the palm of the hand, and the fingers were Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), spanning across the whole Himalayan range.

The story of Mainstream during the nineteen months of Emergency is both exciting and rewarding. It has many lessons to impart. The confrontation with a despotic authority could not possibly be direct and formal: by its very logic it was in the nature of a continuous political guerilla warfare for eighteen long months until its forcible closure with the issue of December 26, 1976. It could reappear only with the relaxation of Emergency following Indira Gandhi’s fateful decision to go to the polls.

[Reproduced below is a piece from NC’s Writings first published in Mainstream on July 1, 1995]
As years pass by, one after the other, the past recedes more and more into distant memory. There are certain events in the life of a nation as of individuals, to which distance does not lend enchantment to the view. Rather the ugly visage falls into the pattern of historical evolution and lives on as such. One such event in our lifetime, and in our very land was the Emergency which was (…)

From class struggles to women’s rights to fighting occupation, Israel’s ’independent left’ was never a cohesive social movement. Yet its impact is being felt to this day.

It is worth remembering that the movement of statues, beheading Columbus in Boston or throwing the slave trader Colston in Bristol, was preceded by a proposal to unbolt the statue of Gandhi in Ghana in 2018 and the destruction of that of Schoelcher (he voted for the abolition of slavery) in the West Indies. For Gandhi, we are coming back to the charge in the English city of Leicester at this very moment...