November 10, 2007

It was not an unexpected development. For several weeks now there were reports in the press that President Pervez Musharraf was planning to proclaim Emergency or Martial Law in Pakistan. In fact the news of Benazir Bhutto travelling to Dubai from Karachi to meet her family members there was accompanied by the apprehension of Musharraf staging the military coup while she was away (which is what happened).
Finally on Saturday, November 3 Musharraf shed all his masks and came out in his true (…)

Venerable Gopal Gandhi,
I write this letter reluctantly but feel it my duty to request you, as the head of the State of West Bengal, to consider what measures, if any, may taken to see that the people of the State, particularly of Nandigram, enjoy security and liberty. Possession of property, without threat of deprivation in the guise of land acquisition for industrial development, and assuring peaceful co-existence of progressive agriculture and industry with promise of more employment (…)

Persons in political authority tend to think that they have an official prerogative to prevaricate. In an open democracy certain manipulation of truth, like the famous example of a glass half full or half empty, is permitted and tolerated. But any deliberate inexactitude of fact is not acceptable. If any party in power goes on displaying this phenomenon one could be justified in reading some sinister motive in their behavioral pattern. In West Bengal the Chief Minister went on repeating that (…)

[(This article, written on the occasion of Indira Gandhi’s twentythird death anniversary (which was observed on October 31, 2007), could not be used last week; hence it is being published now. —Editor )]
Prime Ministers come and go, but some just don’t leave the office. Their policies influence future decisions, their statecraft stirs debate and their legacy wins or loses elections. They shape history. Indira Gandhi’s reign for 16 years as the Prime Minister marked a watershed in India’s (…)

Beijing thoughtfully chose a sub-provincial city on the banks of the Songhua River in the far northeast corner of China as the setting for the third “stand alone” trilateral meeting with Russia and India at the Foreign Ministers’ level, which China last month hosted for the first time.
Harbin, nicknamed “Moscow of the Orient”, is a city with which Russia and its culture has been long and intimately associated. A foreigner travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late 1980s would (…)

[(November 7 this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the historic October Revolution that heralded the birth of the USSR and transformed the world. On this occasion we reproduce the following report by the Mainstream editor written while he was working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1977 (on the basis of an interview with a legendary participant in the October Revolution on the eve of the Revolution’s sixtieth anniversary). Although written in conditions vastly different from (…)

The Red Star over the Kremlin spires will shine brighter this week when on November 7 the world celebrates the grand jubilee of the greatest revolution in history.
The pilgrimge to Moscow today is indeed the triumphant proclamation of man’s unending quest for building a better and a nobler world, in which the blood and toil of the many can never be turned into the greed and gold of a few, where the meek and the humble shall inherit the earth. Those who will gather in the the Red Square on (…)

[(This brief record of the first few days of the Great October Revolution shows the titanic effort and the energy Lenin displayed in guiding it. The popular uprising that swept the country was led by the Bolshevik Party. )]
Evening, November 6
At 9.00 pm from the apartment in Vyborgskaya Storona in Petrograd in which he was in hiding, Lenin sent a letter to the members of the Party Central Committee, calling for an immediate attack.
“Comrades,
“I am writing these lines on the (…)

On the bitter cold November night when the sailors of the battleship Aurora fired at the Czar’s Winter Palace at Petrograd they knew that they were participating in a historic revolution, but were perhaps unaware of the fact that they were pushing the world from the dark catacombs of pre-history to the open arena of history. What the Russian Revolution achieved this week fifty years ago was indeed to help to bring about what Marx had foretold, that with the abolition of class exploitation of (…)

One important reason for the many confusions and contradictions in the recent debate on the India-US 123 Agreement is that these merely reflect some glaring contradictions in the wider debate on nuclear energy and atomic weapons.
• The existing arsenals of nuclear weapons on earth have the capacity to destroy most forms of life on our planet many times over. Clearly the complete elimination of these weapons from earth should get the highest priority. But at present non-proliferation (…)