September 13, 2008

Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee characterised the accord reached late at night on Sunday (September 7) between the West Bengal State Government on the one hand and the agitators in Singur calling for land-for-land rehabilitation of those peasants evicted by the Tata Motors’ Nano car plant on the fertile soil of the area on the other as a ‘moral victory’ of the movement launched for the protection of Maa, Maati o Manush (that is, the Mother, the Soil and the People). Ever since she (…)

North Bihar has floods every year and therefore there is a feeling that this year too it is largely the same as before even as the floods this time have devastated 16 districts, badly affecting some four million people. But this is not the case. The present Kosi flood reminds one of the floods before 1955 when the eastern Kosi embankment was not there and the Kosi was flowing in the natural manner causing heavy damages. It is a river which has a character of heavy erosion and thus changing (…)

While the proliferation of arms has proved costly everywhere in terms of the increased risk to human lives, this cost has been the highest in communities already burdened heavily with poverty and denial of basic needs. As a recent report by Amnesty International and other leading NGOs titled ‘Guns or Growth’ said:
The impact of the misuse of small arms is felt across the world, but most keenly in poor countries. In these countries, the infrastructure required to cope with the impact of (…)

The Jammu and Kashmir State is passing through an unprecedented popular upsurge, for the first time simultaneously in its two main regions, though in divergent directions.
Apparently, the cause of this upsurge is difference over government land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. It did provide a flash- point to the simmering volcano that already existed.
In Kashmir militants and separatists were providing an outlet to the sense of alienation. Suddenly both declined, partly due to the (…)

In the brochures and posters of Indian tourism, Kashmir still figures with its enchanting attractions. In reality, however, the picturesque Valley of Kashmir is becoming out of bounds for the peace-loving citizens of this country.
In a sense, Kashmir today represents the gravest challenge to Indian democracy—perhaps much more than what happened at Ayodhya on December 6 and all that followed. If the bomb blast in Bombay on March 12 and the blow-up of the bomb storage in Calcutta that came (…)

The UPA Government’s deception of the Indian people on the nuclear deal has been clearly exposed in the answers provided by the US State Department, on January 16, 2008, to the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in response to the queries posed by the latter on October 5, 2007. These responses were made public only on September 2, 2008 and had been kept under wraps so far at the request of the State Department as they were considered “diplomatically sensitive”. It does not take (…)

Some things are scandalously evident in the current nuclear tamasha in the Capital, even to a non-specialist like this writer.
One, the drama over India getting the so-called waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group was totally engineered by the West. The purpose was to heighten tensions in New Delhi and make it agree to script changes which would not be taken to the Union Cabinet, the Parliament where votes had to be purchased for the government to survive July 22 in order to clinch the (…)

India’s National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan made an astounding claim in a television interview on August 6 that “divine intervention” might have secured for the country a “waiver” from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG). The “waiver” allows India to have global nuclear commerce without formally signing either the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and paves the way for the US Congress to ratify a potentially lucrative civilian nuclear (…)

[(REJOINDER)]
There are a few inaccuracies in Kartar Singh Duggal’s article on the above subject which appeared in the ‘Independence Day Special’ issue of Mainstream (August 16, 2008). For example, the Punjab Land Colonisation Act, 1907 did not concern the question of land revenue or water rates which were enhanced through separate measures taken by the then State Government. The Act was applied to colony lands and had the effect of restricting the landowners’ rights in such matters as (…)

I
Now, as Miss Austen would have said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that India is the world’s largest democracy.
What, however, is less well-known is that it is also the most sinuously adjustable.
Take any of India’s political parties—excluding the ossified Left which remains unprofitably wedded to principle, although the principle may change from circumstance to circumstance—and you will find that its elected legislators may, whenever the paramount “national interest” so (…)