August 4, 2007

The Special TADA Court for the trial of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case has completed its work by sentencing film star Sanjay Dutt to six years’ r.i. With the sentences served on him and three of his associates, the curtain has come down on the long drawn out case. The sentencing of Sanjay has resulted in a controversy with Mumbai’s film fraternity unitedly expressing its sense of shock and disbelief. Some have—echoing the Union I&B Minister—termed the sentence as harsh. These (…)

Do Not Cry for the Bombay Riot Victims (Bombay Riot Victims Pe Mat Ro!!)
With the TADA court sentencing the last accused in the Bombay bomb blast case, the demand for justice to the Bombay riot victims has started gaining momentum. And people are revisiting the historic Srikrishna Commission report which has aptly stated: One common link (between the riots and the bomb blasts) appears to be that the former appear to have been a causative factor for the latter. The serial bomb blasts were (…)

Indian democracy was designed by our Constitution’s Founding Fathers after long deliberations in the Constituent Assembly to produce a people-oriented Republic built on the widest adult franchise sans caste, sans creed and greed, sans gender discrimination and vesting a vote in every citizen of and above age 18. They have the right to ballot bravely and elect MLAs and MPs whose powers as members of the Legislature are impregnably large as laid down in the Suprema Lex. We have adopted the (…)

I first met Chandra Shekhar when I was working as the Secretary of the Praja Socialist Party’s Parliamentary Group in its office at Canning Lane, New Delhi in the late fifties. Since then I maintained regular contacts with him irrespective of his party affiliations. For, we shared a broad political approach to various national problems. And despite shifting his allegiance from the socialist movement to the Congress to the Janata Party and to the Samajwadi Janata Party, there was a basic (…)

[(COMMUNICATION)]
Dr Prem Singh, in his article on Chandra Shekhar (in the July 14 issue of Mainstream) has brought out an important aspect of the bereaved leader’s views on globalisation and his intrepid activities on that issue. A further account of his activities in that direction is given hereunder. After the agreement between the Government of India and the Department of Agriculture of the US Government in December 1999 relating to India’s removal of quantitative restrictions on about (…)

On June 19, a Nobel Laureate and a national heroine of Burma (now named Myanmar), the second largest country in South-East Asia [area-wise], spent her 62nd birthday confined to her home with no means of contact with her family and with only armed guards for company.
In the previous month the ruling military dictatorship of Myanmar turning a deaf ear to the urgings of 60 heads of government, past and present (that included George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Vaclav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, (…)

This is not a story of the fifty plus children’s doctor Binayak Sen from Raipur, Chhattisgarh who is at present languishing in jail under the draconian provisions of a law which has declared him a ‘terrorist’ because he had the courage to speak truth to power.
This is not meant to be a story of two young daughters of this man who are eagerly waiting for their father who is one of their closest friends and with whom they have shared all the secrets of the world.
This is not a story of (…)

To write about a politician, one runs the risk of being either a self-seeker trying to get some material advantage if one spoke good of him, or a run-of-the mill faultfinder who failed to get his desired benefits if one wrote against him. But being neither, I do not hesitate to record an incident of great moral magnitude regarding the late Subodh Banerjee.
Subodh Banjerjee was a firebrand labour leader with such incendiary oratorical skill that both his friends and detractors used to say (…)

[( This month marks the seventyfirst anniversary of the first of the Moscow Trials. On this occasion we are publishing the following article. Subrata Sen has studied in depth the atrocities committed during the Stalin regime in the USSR and other Soviet-modelled socialist states and written extensively on the subject. —-Editor)]
HOW THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY WAS TRANSFORMED INTO ITS OPPOSITE
In August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938, three trials were held in the October Hall of (…)

By the time these lines reach the reader, India will be having a new President who, according to the Constitution, is due to hold office for five years, that is, beyond the present millennium. That the choice has been widely welcomed is borne out by the fact that all the major national parties supported Narayanan’s candidature, while the rumbustious who contested him lost his deposit. One has to thank God for that because most of what Seshan has handled so far has ended up in inane (…)