December 22, 2007 - Annual Number 2007

Iran claimed to have carried out a successful test of its long-range missile, Ashura, on November 27, 2007, which has the capability to strike targets in Israel and US bases in the Middle East. The missile is named after the Shia holy day of mourning for the death of Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, in 680. It is a multi-stage missile with a stated range of 2000 km. One Russian military officer claimed that there is no truth behind Iran’s ballistic missile programme as there are (…)

[(This article has been written with a view to stimulate discussion on the subject. —Editor)]
DISCUSSION
The Soviet Union was a great source of inspiration not only for Communists but millions of people outside the fold of Communists as well. Its collapse has created deep confusion among Communists and non-Communists with the widespread belief that socialism has failed. This is one of the main reasons for the setback of Communists and even faithlessness amongst the Communists. On the (…)

The Alvas—Joachim and Violet—were a unique couple. They are the first husband and wife team, I had come across, who were both gifted journalists. Nearly forty years later, we have T.N. and Sevanti Ninan, both colleagues in the Hindustan Times in the 1970s. Like the Ninans, the Alvas too were from different linguistic communities. Joachim was a Mangalorean, while Violet a Gujarati. Sevanti is a Bengali speaking daughter of an Andhra cadre IAS officer settled in Hyderabad, while TN is from (…)

Introduction
There cannot be—should not be—two views on the need for India to implement an effective HIV/AIDS Programme to prevent this deadly disease and provide specific attention and assistance to those already afflicted. But the National Aids Control Programme-Phase III (NACP-III), quietly launched by the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) in May this year, raises enormous disquiet on several scores. Foremost is the nature of the predominant substantive content of a $ 2.5 (…)

Almost two years ago, Ajay Kapur, a prominent global strategist of the Citigroup and his two associates, Niall Macleod and Narendra Singh, came out with a paper “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances”. If the formulations contained in this paper are correct, they will have far-reaching implications, upsetting the long-standing understanding of economists all over the world.
Ajay Kapur and his associates assert that world is getting divided into two blocs, namely, the (…)

Introduction
IIn recent weeks several efforts have been made at various levels to draw attention to the conditions of extreme distress prevailing in the Bundelkhand region of UP. The State Government has already declared all the districts of this region (Jhansi, Mahoba, Hamirpur, Jalaun, Lalitpur, Chitrakoot, Banda ) to be drought affected.
The following report on this region is based on talks with the people in over 35 villages spread over all the seven districts during the year (…)

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) broadside in its mouthpiece Panchjanya against the patriotic pretensions of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia has laid bare an interesting chapter in the history of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857-58.1 The focus on the incontestable truth that Maharaja Jiwajirao Scindia had joined the East India Company as a faithful ally when Rani Lakshmibai fought valiantly against the British forces and died a heroic death on the battlefield is indeed (…)

There is widespread dismay because the Government of India seems to have let down the charismatic democratic leader of Myanmar who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and whom we honoured with the Gandhi Prize in 1993, at a historical moment when the struggle she leads for a popularly elected government acquired unexpected legitimacy. She was put in jail by the military junta—and that is where she still is—when her party, the National League for Democracy, won 395 seats in the 1990 (…)

It’s on the principles of Gandhism that political India is at its most hypocritical. In such an India it is not ironic that Gandhi’s memory is most severely insulted in his home State of Gujarat, now turned unabashedly violent. Nor was there any irony in Sonia Gandhi waxing eloquent in the UN about non-violence without a word about the violence in India or in freshly bleeding Burma. When did we last hear India’s political establishment raising an ethical voice against violence or (…)

The revelation of archival expletive stuff on Indians in general and Indira Gandhi in particular from the Nixon-Kissinger era is a sharp pointer to the imperative need for relaxing the irrational restrictive policy regarding access to our own archival resources. This sensational disclosure was possible only because of the willingness of the Office of the Historian of the US Department of State to part even with information that has the potential of damaging the reputation of the government. (…)