2021

* Review NPR-NRC: Disruptive, expensive, impractical, illogical | SG Vombatkere
* Return of the Military Memoir | Andrew Plowman
* Music Suited to Party Line - Shostakovich paid a price | Harsh Kapoor

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, May 29, 2021
Cyclone Yaas struck India’s eastern coast on May 26, 2021. This has led to considerable dislocation and damage to thousands of homes in rural areas of Orissa and West Bengal. Some 1.2 million people were evacuated to shelters before the cyclone. The scale of damage assessment is still underway. One thing is clear, that greater frequency we are witnessing adverse weather events, and from what climate scientists predict this is going to be the (…)

Supercyclone Yaas made a landfall between Balasore and Paradip on May 26. Under its impact extensive damage to property, public as well as private was caused in both Odisha and the southern part of West Bengal. The Government of West Bengal undertook a massive evacuation of 1.5 million people from the areas which were to bear the main brunt of the storm. The districts most severely affected were Jhargram, West and East Medinipur and South 24-Parganas. Fourteen thousand relief camps were set (…)

In his seminal text, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005), Giorgio Agamben argued: “The question of borders becomes all the more urgent: if exceptional measures are the result of periods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds...,then they find themselves in the paradoxical position of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form (…)

IMPRESSIONS When times are normal, the quality of leadership is not on trial; even an unimaginative head of a country, an organisation, a family can get by. The situation changes when a threat looms. Covid created such a situation in India and the record shows that it was handled in a manner no one can be proud of.
To a large extent, the situation was handled from a standpoint not of public good but of public relations. The result was that the people did not quite know what was (…)

May 19, 2021
Illegal migrants living inside India is a worrying, long-standing reality dating back to the 1950s. This is so especially in several border states. Over decades, successive governments of different political persuasions at centre have amended the Citizenship legislation several times, but have only complicated, not helped to resolve if not solve, the issue. Together, the centre and states have failed to solve the problem of identifying illegal migrants. These failures have (…)

by P. S Jayaramu
Without doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic is the greatest national human disaster faced by India in the post- independence era. In meeting the challenge, the Central Government has regrettably failed in many respects. Many analysts and Opposition Parties have criticised the Modi Government on several grounds. Of late, we are reading about the simmering discontent among senior members of the Government as well as the BJP’s parent body the RSS, as is evident from the concluding (…)

by M.J.Vinod*
The assumption of power by the Biden Presidency has opened out many possibilities for the future of multilateralism. His return to multilateral diplomacy, trade and politics seems to be quite promising. The Trump administration ripped apart all that was carefully nurtured over the years. In his first few days in office Trump withdrew from the Paris climate change agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Iran Nuclear Deal, and delegitimized the very idea of (…)

May 09, 2021
While Indian and Chinese army commanders circle around each other, like Sumo wrestlers, waiting for the right moment to clinch, our political leaders have not spelt out what their overarching objectives are in the pursuit of India-China relations.
Is it our strategic aim to rival and overtake the Chinese? And is it, therefore, our tactical aim to not cede “an inch” of what we believe is an integral and inalienable part of Mother India, sanctified by the Vedas, the Puranas, (…)

by Santosh Kumar *
Introduction:
The QUAD which serves to be an acronym of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is an association of four countries namely; India, Japan, US, and Australia. The Quad was initiated in the year 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with the help of US, India and Australia. The very purpose of the security dialogue was to counter the Chinese economic and military influence and to facilitate dialogue and cooperation among the member countries. However the idea (…)