October 2009

Some of the corporate houses of the country have now reasons to feel despondent. Contrary to public perception, even after Singur and Nandigram they had not lost faith in the West Bengal Government’s ability to acquire agricultural lands of poor farmers for setting up projects which are likely to fatten the money bags of those industrial barons and their middlemen. Recently this came out into the open after a sordid drama was unmasked in what is now being called in West Bengal the Vedic (…)

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa must be a rare civilian leader who has given birth to a new military concept by winning the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Defence academies and experts have been studying what has come to be known as the “Rajapaksa model”.
The unexpected and complete demolition of the LTTE—long considered the most feared terrorist organisation in the world which had successfully withstood the might of the Sri Lankan state for nearly three (…)

Colombo’s victory over the Tamils shows India’s power is on the wane.
Thousands of non-combatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final phase of the Sri Lankan war this year as government forces overran the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Nearly five months after Colombo’s stunning military triumph, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out—in the name of “eternal vigilance”—to expand by 50 per cent an already-large military. Little (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation by Badri Narayan; 2009; Sage; pages 195.
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring (…)

To understand the correct history of India’s independence and partition, it is necessary to know Britain’s economic position after WW II. Churchill had said: “We are not fighting this war (and spending money) to lose our Empire.” Till the war end British politicians did not understand that though the empire was necessary for the British, they had no power left to rule it. Colonial Secretary Cranebourne (the grandson of Lord Salisbury) believed in 1942 that the “British Empire is not dead, it (…)

TRIBUTE
My first introduction to Balagopal was as a brilliant mathematician with a doctorate from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a lecturer at the Kakatiya University in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. Balagopal had to leave his job at the Kakatiya University because there was a danger that he would be killed by the police because he had been taking up the cause of the Naxalites.
I could not help smile when I remembered our first meeting as lawyer and client and he had looked at the (…)

TRIBUTE
At first it seemed a huge, obscene lie, the news of his death. It did not seem possible—he had been busy as always the weekend before, at a human rights convention in Ananthapur, to mark 10 years of the Human Rights Forum, the organisation he and others started in 1998. That had become a pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts in the weekends, to enquire into rights violations—land grabbing by the state or private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous open (…)

TRIBUTE
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the legendary political patriarch of the most influential family of American politics and a man who knew huge privilege and terrible tragedy in near equal measure in his life, passed away on August 25, 2009 at his home in Hyannis post Massachusetts at the age of 77.
His death signals the end of an era that held sway from the early 1960s. He was the youngest surviving brother of the four Kennedys. Edward Kennedy lived in the shadow of his (…)

The following article reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. However, in view of the undiminished validity of its contents, it is being published now. —Editor
Indonesia’s second direct presidential election on July 8 took the country a step forward in consolidating the amazing democratic experiment it started 12 years ago. The financial crises of 1997, the end of 32 years of authoritarian rule under President Soeharto in 1998, the (…)

DOCUMENT
The following is the resolution adopted at the National Convention of the Citizens Initiative for Peace held in the Capital on October 20, 2009. The convention was addressed, inter alia, by Justice P.B. Sawant, Prof Randhir Singh, Aruna Roy, Surendra Mohan, Prof G. Hargopal, Sandeep Pandey, Ajit Bhattacharjea, Prof Manoranjan Mohanty, as well as representatives from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orisssa, West Bengal; victims of state violence in Chhattisgarh also gave testimony of (…)