June 28, 2008

In the wake of the failure of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal to break the deadlock over taking the India-specific safeguards agreement worked out with the IAEA to the atomic watchdog’s Board of Governors for approval, it is necessary to dispassio-nately analyse the subject. If one undertakes such an exercise, it would become transparent that the PM’s plea that the nuclear deal would ensure energy security for the country is vastly exaggerated. In fact the contention of Manmohan (…)

For almost a decade or so, the news of suicides by debt-ridden farmers has been constantly hogging the headlines of Indian newspapers. These suicides have been taking place largely in relatively more advanced States like Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka etc. The relatively backward States like Orissa, Bihar, UP, Jharkhand, Assam, Chhattisgarh etc. have been largely immune from this epidemic. This may be because the relatively advanced States have been more closely linked up (…)

Ten years ago, in the afternoon of June 27, 1998, Nikhil Chakravartty breathed his last. Remembering him after 10 years, we are reproducing some of his finest reports, editorials and articles that appeared in this journal and elsewhere over the last sixty years. We are also reproducing the speech that our former President, K.R. Narayanan, delivered while unveiling N.C.’s portrait at the Press Council of India (New Delhi, February 28, 1999), and publishing several reminiscences by those who (…)

The following is one of the best exposés of N.C. as a reporter and it was carried in the India Press Agency feature news service N.C. had founded with another outstanding Communist journalist, David Cohen (who thereafter left the Communist Party on the issue of Jewish persecution in the Soviet Union) in 1957. This report resulted in M.O. Mathai’s resignation from the post of the PM’s Special Assistant following a furore in Parliament in 1959.
New Delhi, January 3—A question is very often (…)

The ouster of the Karunanidhi Ministry and the imposition of President’s Rule in Tamil Nadu can hardly be regarded as anything more than the streamlined extension of the Emergency dispensation over a State whose government by devious means tried to avoid falling in line with it.
On this score, the Governor’s report has a ring of authenticity’s though it can be legitimately asked why K.K. Shah had to take—or persuaded to take—seven long months to come to this conclusion. For the lay (…)

Twelve years ago Jawaharlal Nehru died in harness on May 27. Inevitably, much has changed in these twelve years among his people and in the humanity at large. He was not the man who would have preferred the status quo to change; and if the landscape and the skyline of this country have changed—at places beyond recognition—Nehru, had he been alive, would have tried to understand them, accelerate the process of change.
What we who belong to the generations after him have to ponder over is (…)

Parliament has just repealed the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act which came into force twenty years ago in 1956. Late Feroze Gandhi, who initiated and piloted the Bill in Parliament, made a powerful case which might have been useful for the present Government to bear in mind. Sri Bhupesh Gupta, in his signed article in New Age of February 1, 1976, has recalled Feroze Gandhi’s speech, from which a significant portion is reproduced here below:
“For the success of (…)

A strange situation of apparently contradictory facets mark the present phase of India’s relationship with the United States of America.
Of late, there is a surfeit of talks about “shared values” ranging from commitment to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. To this has been added in recent months, the government’s new economic policy which plays up private enterprise and underplays public sector—at least that’s how it has been taken in the USA. And the government, in the (…)

The enthusiasm generated by the two-day India-Pakistan Peoples’ Convention, which was held last week in New Delhi, is certainly not a government-sponsored outfit.
The organisers on the Indian side are well-known for their severely critical stand on many issues pertaining to the handling of the crisis in Punjab and Kashmir. In the understanding of the average newspaper reader in the Capital, many of those who were responsible for arranging the meeting are highly critical of the role of the (…)

On June 27, 1998 passed away in New Delhi the founder of this journal. On the occasion of his tenth death anniversary we carry the following pieces as a token of our remembrance and homage to his memory.
It is a poignant moment for me to have unveiled this beautiful, lively portrait of Nikhilda at the premises of the Press Council. On such a pleasant sunny Sunday morning as this, I recollect many a breakfast together with Nikhilda, breakfasts at which he used to enthrall me with his ideas, (…)