2021

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, November 27, 2021
Promises at the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow by our Prime Minister had no parliamentary consensus or approval across political parties that we know of. In the days ahead the Winter session of Parliament will meet to a packed schedule. It is not likely that there will be any discussion there, on India’s energy transition & environmental plans with a focus on Climate Change. Such matters are not considered as requiring urgent (…)

IMPRESSIONS
At last we have someone teaching us real history. Real history is that India did not win freedom in 1947. What it gained at that time was a charity gift from Britain, bheek, meaning alms, such as a housewife gives a beggar. Freedom as distinct from bheek came in 2014 thanks to the BJP and Narendra Modi.
No BJP leader has put it so neatly. So who did it now? Kangana Renaut. Who she? A film actress. But she is not just any tuppeny actress. She knows politics and (…)

18 November 2021
The late Edatata Narayanan, my editor at the Patriot and Link at the cusp of the 1960s-70s, had a very few words, spoken in his gravelly but precise voice to define the relationship between a news reporter, the State, and the bit of information that needed to be conveyed to the reader. “I want my reporter in Police headquarters; not the police reporter in my newsrooms.”
It was a directive loaded with the truth of the times, and some eternal confrontations between Truth (…)

Bardoli Satyagraha of Farmers of 1928 Defeated Divisive Politics of British Rulers and Farmers’ Movement Against Farm Laws Retrieving Secular Values offers Lessons to Save Constitution

by Dr A. Basheer *
“Government by the people”, an inspiring and revolutionary idea defines democracy. Free and fair regular election that counts citizen’s vote equally is its cornerstone. Voting is the means of political participation and change. Universal adult franchise guarantees equal participation for all in the election – political equality. Competing political parties (Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties- E.E. Schatt Schneider -in Party government, 1942) avail (…)

by Upal Chakraborty *
The long-drawn struggle of the farmers has resulted in the Government unilaterally scrapping the three Bills. The farmers view this as a partial victory while the apologists for the Government maintain that the farmers are shifting goalposts. The latter contention is not at all true. The demand for a legal sanction for the MSP and implementation of Swaminathan Commission recommendations on the exact quantum have been long-standing demands included in the recent (…)

by Archishman Raju
This year is the centenary of the Communist Party of China and is also the end of the centenary of the non-cooperation movement in India. Hence, today, a 100 years after these struggles began in their modern form, it is opportune to examine the commonalities between the Indian anti-colonial struggle and the Chinese Revolution. This examination happens in an atmosphere when the system of global free-market capitalism is in a deep political and economic crisis. Inequality (…)

by Prof. Sunil Ray *
The first two wars of Independence were fought against external colonialism. Now it is another war being waged against internal colonialism through organising what I call ‘solidarity movement’. It has made its beginning with the emergence of a new political process, -an alignment of progressive forces - politics of ‘polarization’ that independent India is witnessing again with the onset of the farmers’ movement. Before this, it was anti-emergency move that succeeded to (…)

by Nupur Rastogi*
"Hey, you back seats, don’t fight."
"Are you fighting? Do you want punishment? No, right? Then sit silently."
"Whosoever won’t fight all this week would be the star student of this week."
Have you heard such phrases (ultimatums) in classrooms when you were a child? Were you one of those students whom the teacher would call and threaten not to fight again? Or were you were beaten unnecessarily by a teacher over a fight that you did not even start?
I was a teacher (…)

by Asmita Pant *
Women’s Entrepreneurship Day (WED) is a day on which the work of women entrepreneurs is celebrated and is globally observed on the nineteenth of November of each year. However, women in India are not basking with the glory of entrepreneurship spirt. Number of factors could be attributed to the banality of stoic entrepreneurial ambitions.
Women form an estimate of 48.04% of the total population of India. But when it comes to the percentage of female entrepreneurs, they (…)