February 2009

The Satyam scandal has shaken not only the corporate world but the entire governmental system at the State and Central levels. The Prime Minister was himself deeply worried. He described the scandal as a blot on the corporate image of India and expressed his determination to go to the root of the scandal. He should have rather realised that the scandal was a scar on the neo-liberal policy which he initiated in 1991 and the time has come to get to the root of the policy and the government and (…)

Business fraud is nothing new in India. Businessmen are known to go to great lengths to make money through legitimate and illegitimate ways. Clever accountants and lawyers are employed to devise ways to generate higher profits for the businessmen.
The Satyam affair stunned everyone when its supposedly ‘honest’ chairperson admitted to committing fraud over the last several years. Apparently, Satyam has been defrauded of Rs 7000 crores but the final tally could be larger. The loss to (…)

Satyam! Shivam! Sundaram??
The nation wakes up to the news of the day on January 16, 2009: The Prime Minister addresses the captains of industry, sending a message to India Inc. at the Trident Oberoi hotel in Mumbai. The content: ‘Everything is back to normal.. India is safe.. please come back.’ It is a day after the front page of almost every newspaper splashed the silent waters. Reports could not resist the analytical temptation and passed suspicion-laced comments. The (…)

Dear Fidel,
The Trotskyites say
That the revolution you made
Was not a proper one;
It was not even socialist.
It was not led by the proletariat,
But by petty-bourgeois, nationalist elements.
They remind us that on your
First trip to the United States
After the victory over Batista,
You openly said you are not a communist.
They remind us how
You ganged up with the Stalinist PSP,
Which in turn had lent support
To Batista in the 1940s.
They even say that at Havana (…)

From February 5 to 8, 2009 an International Media Mission was in Nepal for a rapid assessment of the serious situation with regard to press freedom in that country. The mission members were: Toby Mendel and Sejal Parmar (Article 19), Sukumar Muralidharan (International Federation of Journalists), Thomas Hughes (International Media Support), Binod Dhungel (Reporter without Borders), Serena Pepino and Iskra Panevska (UNESCO), Mark Bench (World Press Freedom Committee), Sumit Chakravartty (…)

[( A few days ago the Mainstream editor received the following article with a letter from the author that read:
“I’m a historian of India from the University of Chicago where I’m presently completing my dissertation under the supervision of Drs Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, Moishe Postone, and Ralph Austen. Whenever I come to India to do research I read Mainstream regularly. I have written a longish piece criticising the Left-wing media discourse surrounding the Mumbai attacks as (…)

The nerve-wracking hours of terror in Mumbai are over. Now it is the time of reckoning. Sensible observers remind us that our experience of terror attacks has a long history. The eminent Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, observes in this connection that the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 led to riots, which took the lives of some two thousand Sikhs. In her recent discourse on Azadi, Arundhati Roy reminded us “of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been (…)

Media
Lasantha Wickrematunga was the founder editor of the Sri Lankan publication, The Sunday Leader. He was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Colombo on January 8, 2009. He had a strange premonition of his impending assassination and wrote the following editorial before his murder. It is a brilliant testimony to his abiding faith in the noble profession of journalism as well as his exemplary courage. He fearlessly exposed corruption and human rights abuses while supporting the (…)

The inadvertent remarks by our High Commissioner in Colombo about payment of a good sum to the LTTE leader has not only come as a total surprise but has led to repercussions which are turning out to be highly embarrassing for the government.
High Commissioner Dixit is not only a senior member of our Foreign Service but is known for his maturity and competence. He has handled in the past such difficult assignments as Bangladesh immediately after its liberation in 1972 when he was the (…)

Review Article
Alternative Economic Survey, India 2007-08: Decline of the Developmental State by Alternative Survey Group; Daanish Books, Delhi; 2008, pp. 319, Rs 295.
The global economy is today facing unprece-dented crisis with falling production and job losses. To prevent economic collapse the governments of the US and other developed countries are giving massive bail-out packages to their failing banks and financial institutions and virtually nationalising them. There has been a (…)