October 2009

Respected Chief Minister,
I would put your by-election losses behind you and think ahead of the future. Elections reflect voter sovereignty It would be vain to expect the voter to line up all the time behind you even if your total score-card has been great but there have been some misses here and there. It is these misses that the voter picks on in by-elections with a view to drawing your attention rather than deserting you.
Every government has two main problems, the party (…)

(October 12 this year marks the fortysecond death anniversary of Dr Rammanohar Lohia, the stormy petrel of the Indian socialist movement who, besides being one of the most versatile personalities in our freedom struggle, was a profound, innovative and original socialist thinker. Incidentally, his birth centenary celebrations have begun from March 23, 2009, which was Dr Lohia’s nintyninth birth anniversary. On this occasion we are reproducing Mainstream’s first editor’s tribute to the (…)

(The following is a chapter from the author’s forthcoming book, Lohia Remembered.)
The twentieth century politics belonged to the endeavours of just one man: Mahatma Gandhi. Dr Lohia was one of the thousands of Indians who were inspired by Gandhi to dedicate their lives to public service beginning with the urgent task of India’s freedom from British rule. By his own admission, Dr Lohia was inspired by two men, fully by Gandhi and partly by Nehru.
Dr Lohia was introduced to Gandhi (…)

COMMUNICATION
I am sorry to learn that the veteran journalist and media critic, G.S. Bhargava, passed away on September 22. It is a great loss to the Indian media world. I had been an avid reader of his writings in Mainstream and his Sunday column “Blue Pencil” in The Pioneer when Vinod Meta was its editor. The Editor’s Guild in a statement had aptly summed up his contributions thus: “The Blue Pencil column was looked forward to by journalists with both eagerness and uneasiness, as he was (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Jinnah: India-Partition Independence by Jaswant Singh; Rupa and Company, New Delhi; pages 669; Rs 695.
As I completed the enjoyable navigation through the ponderous, pompous, and pontificatory prose of Jaswant Singh, I was reminded of three other famous writers:
Oscar Wilde: The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Benedetto Croce: All historiography is contemporary historiography.
Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to (…)

I am grateful to Ms Vasudha Dhagamwar for raising a debate about the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill 2009 [‘On Opposition to the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill’ by Vasudha Dhagamwar, Mainstream (September 19, 2009)—a rejoinder to my ‘Why We Must Oppose the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill of 2009’, Mainstream (August 14, 2009)]. It is only through the clash of ideas that new ideas are born.
To take her “small matter” first, I received a copy of the Bill from the Ministry of (…)

This article was written before the latest declaration of US President Barack Obama reversing the missile defence system that has been welcomed by Russian PM Vladimir Putin.
The declaration of independence by the Kosovo Assembly in the Muslim majority region of Serbia, on February 17, 2008, has posed serious challenges before the world community. This declaration received conflicting reactions from the international community and is strongly opposed by Serbia which continues to claim (…)

COMMUNICATION
In the important debate in Mainstream on Gandhiji’s efforts to save the life of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru (the latest contribution to which has appeared in the September 12, 2009 issue), various points of view have been well articulated. Some participants in the debate have said that Gandhiji made as much effort as he could under the circumstances, while some have said that he failed to make adequate effort.
However, my view is that the issue of saving the (…)

The G-20 summit at Pittsburgh has no doubt succeeded in taking on the role and mantle of the G-8 as per its declaration but what has it achieved in concrete terms? By announcing that there will be no premature withdrawal of the stimulus package it, of course, underscored the importance that the summiteers attached to the short-term recovery from the global financial and economic disaster; but in the absence of a decisive move towards financial sector reforms any breakthrough eluded the (…)

Amidst the whirlwind of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation, the main casualty is man. Not that he was ever at the centre-stage after the industrial revolution with capitalism in the saddle. But he had still the power to resist its inhuman onslaught through unionisation. Globalisation, which is the present incarnation of the capitalism and its end product, imperialism, has snuffed out even that little opposition with the national government obeying the dictates of the (…)