March 29, 2008

The Indo-US nuclear deal has generated enough heat to cloud the stability of the Congress-led UPA Government. Without going into the argument over whether the nuclear deal is in or against our national interest, it has raised an important issue of federalisation of the foreign policy and treaty making power of the Central Government.
The Constitution of India gives the Central Government in New Delhi virtually exclusive jurisdiction over issues of foreign and defence policy. In practice (…)

Universities are supposed to perform three major functions: teaching, research and extension. While the debate in our country, both in the academia and the media, has centred round the first two functions, the third is hardly talked about. Which is a great pity, for extension—carrying the benefits of research and learning to the people—is an equally vital function that a university must perform particularly in the context of a country like India. The social role of a university in the Indian (…)

The Janadesh foot-march of 25,000 ‘oppressed of the earth’ from Gwalior to Delhi received a lot of well-deserved attention and praise. I talked to many of these members when they reached Delhi, when they were sitting on dharna and when they were about to take the train back home. All of them had been away from home for over a month, most of them had been walking constantly for 27 days in difficult conditions. Yet not even one of them complained about the numerous difficulties they had faced. (…)

West Asia is the birthplace of Christianity and home to some of the world’s most ancient Christian denominations, namely, Maronite Church, Greek Orthodox, Chaldeans, Nestorians, Syrian Orthodox, Coptic Church, Assyrian Church, Syrian Catholic and so on. For some reasons the Arab Christians have been one of the main victims of the volatile and unstable political situation in West Asia. The colonial ‘God trick’ of nation-state creation and the carving out of modern Arab states (Khashan, 2001) (…)

Small farmers survive on acre-sized plots and landless labourers work on rich farmers’ lots. They plough and they dig, work hard and save while scientists learned rant and rave that such methods are backward, and hi-tech can do with chemical fertilisers and pesticides too, what traditional farming cannot—and they’re right! ’Cause methods traditional don’t kill the earth or fight the forces of Nature. Rather, they re-generate soil health, and farmyard manure helps re-instate soil (…)

Understanding disability has undergone a sea- change in the last few decades especially in the Western countries; this has been significantly shaped by what is known as the social model of disability. The ‘social model of disability’ was a response to the ‘individual/medical model’ that dominated until the 1990s. According to individual/medical model, some physiological or chemical system might be missing or atrophied, or might have been damaged through illness, accident or some other (…)

[(Kerala students, who have set up an organisation, Students Against Nuclear Power (SANP), were on indefinite hunger strike at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to project their demand that the Indo-US civil nuclear deal be scrapped, gave up their fast after eight days on March 17, 2008 following the intervention of and assurance from various socio-political leaders. Their demand has been powerfully raised in the Lok Sabha and in the crucial meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the deal. They (…)