November 2009

On the occasion of the October Revolution’s ninetysecond anniversary we reproduce, with the author’s consent, the following piece that appeared in Nagpur Times eighteen years ago.
Facts must be faced. Masses in the Soviet Union are today bent upon doing away with all vestiges of the October Revolution. Attempts to “analyse” the developments carefully avoiding the cardinal issue of the Stalinist legacy are obviously ridiculous. The current mass upsurge in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (…)

TRIBUTE
This condolence note for K. Balagopal, the eminent human rights activist who expired at the age of 57 from a cardiac arrest on October 8, 2009, is motivated by the feeling that the political man in Balagopal is often given a short shrift.
As with Marx, Balagopal had also undergone an epistemological break in 1993. So we had two Balagopals: the early Balagopal, the Marxist-Leninist who was an advocate of ‘new democratic revolution’, and the late Balagopal, who turned a (…)

COMMUNICATION
The Aami river flows in Sidharthnagar, Gorakhpur and Sant Kabir Nagar for nearly 100 kms before merging into the Rapti, a sub-tributary of the Ganga. This river had close ties with the lives of Gautam Buddha and Sant Kabir. Gautam Buddha gave up his royal dress to take up sanyas on the banks of this river. Sant Kabir breathed his last on the banks of the river in Maghar. His memorial has been built here including a temple as well as a mosque.
However, in recent years (…)

Professor Iqbal Ansari, the one-man army of documentation of facts relating to issues of Muslims in India, passed away on October 13 in his home town of Aligarh, where he grew up and developed a vast treasure of friends working on human rights all over the country. Even those who might have disagreed with some of his overemphasised and simplistic observations, would not disagree with the fact that he was overwhelmingy concerned about the growing animosity on Hindu-Muslim unity, a subject (…)

According to a May 2009 interview with Rear Admiral Chew Men Leong, the Chief of the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN), in the journal Military Technology,
Maritime Security threats are constantly evolving and cannot be dealt with by one agency or a single country. We need to continue to tighten inter-agency cooperation and expand transnational cooperation.
Until very recently, International Maritime Law was tailored mostly to prevent naval clashes between countries. Keeping the (…)

Introduction
Terrorism is an elusive concept. It is a kind of political violence but neither academics nor policy-makers have reached a consensus on its definition. Like every social phenomenon, terrorism is malleable, constantly changing in appearance and evolving structurally, which demands any definition to be all-encompassing. It involves political objectives and goals and relies on violence or the threat of violence. It is designed to generate fear in a target audience that extends (…)