May 19, 2007

The UP Assembly elections have indeed produced amazing results that have surprised most observers barring of course the real victor, Mayawati. However, it needs to be pointed out that one Dalit political leader of a Left party had forecast such a resounding, comprehensive and phenomenal victory for Mayawati’s BSP based on his interactions with officials capable of feeling the pulse of the people at large unlike the mediapersons and pollsters whose predictions and ‘surveys’ (of not only a (…)

There is much talk in the government circles about the diversion of crops to increase the income of farmers. The traditional growing of rice and wheat does not give high prices. If instead vegetables and fruits are grown these will fetch higher prices and these have a foreign market. It is said that in our country also people are increasingly taking more vegetables and fruits instead of grains. This statement is supported by the report of the National Sample Survey, according to which, the (…)

The vandalism at MS University and the abject complicity of the university authorities in the episode are a sad sign of the failure to expand democracy to our civil and social lives. But before the MS University controversy arose, a small news item appeared in sections of the media and then died down without much attention from the media and intellectuals alike.
This concerned the infamous controversy over a reference to Shivaji Maharaj in James Lane’s book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic (…)

The early exit of our ‘Team India’ from the World Cup show in Caribbean Islands has jolted the billion-strong nation. No one had expected that cricket, which is as the most popular street game in India and has engendered household names like Tendulkar, Sehwag and Dhoni, would be a source of embarrassment for a rising country in global politics. That the defeat has come from our small backyard neighbours makes the embarrassment all the more enduring.
However, realists in the sports world (…)

[(The following is what the author wanted to present at a meeting in Karachi when the leaders of the two Indian CPs—the CPI and CPM—visited Pakistan in the recent past. —Editor)]
I intend to ask a few questions to you. But first the perspective in which I am talking.
The international order as it has developed since the 1990s has been profoundly disturbing. I am sure you will share my overall assessment of a unipolar world in which one nation possesses far too much military strength (…)

It is gratifying that Mainstream has published a few interesting and instructive articles as a mark of respect to the memory of the distinguished Communist leader, P.C. Joshi, on his birth centenary (April 14, 2007). The article ‘Remem-bering Puranda’ written by his cousin and namesake, a leading intellectual, captures with sensitivity the anguish and sorrows which P.C. Joshi bore stoically before he died. Until the last moment of his life, there was burning within him a passionate love (…)

India’s Hindu Right-wing is currently in the moral doghouse. Curious fate for an ideological set-up that stridently claims proprietary rights to the terrain of “values”. It is another matter that some fifteen years after they razed the mosque at Ayodhya in a despicable act of profound irreligion, the more conscientious even among Hindu saints and sadhus now openly characterise the BJP as in fact an unprincipled jamboree of crass atheists for whom the building of the Ram temple has been (…)

If any political analyst looks askance as to what kind of a government can democratic colonialism be, he has only to study the Indian Constitution and its working. Its Preamble recites some basic slogans of republican democracy, its Part-III confers all kinds of fundamental rights to the citizens, its Part-IV gives highly laudable but unenforceable directives for state policies, and there the democracy part ends. The rest of the Constitution, in all essential particulars, is a reproduction (…)

Between them, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union, the former out of the noblest of motives and the latter for opportunistic reasons. The West sang paeans of praise first for Gorbachev for his glasnost and perestroika, and later for Yeltsin for delivering the coup de grace to the Soviet Union. There was no job left for President Gorbachev because he had lost his country.
Yet Yeltsin, who was laid to rest in the Novodevichy, together with the great poets and (…)

Maqbool Fida Hussain is at the very centre of a storm whose after-effects are extremely relevant for our democracy—both for the democratic structure of our state and for the preservation of democratic values in our society.
It is not that Hussain is at the centre of a controversy for the first time; in fact, it is seldom he is out of one. He has got thousands of fans, not all because of the beauty of his art but quite a large number applauding him for what would have been called (…)