December 2009

With this issue Mainstream enters the fortyeighth year of its modest existence.
When this weekly made its appearance in 1962, the editorial in the first issue cogently spelt out its basic objectives in the following words:
Faith in the people of India is our shield and armour; determination to resist all attempts to withhold the fruits of freedom from them our only weapon. It shall be our endeavour to try relentlessly to demolish the wall of misunderstanding, mutual suspicion and (…)

Soon after the Pokhran-II tests on May 11 1998, the scientists of the two organisations concerned, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Defence R&D Organisation (DRDO), had jointly evaluated the success of the two tests—the fission device (A-bomb) and the fusion device (H-bomb). While the former device performed perfectly including creating a crater of the expected size, the fusion device failed on many counts—very low yield, no crater etc. International monitoring centres (…)

Citizens of Bangladesh have persevered in their effort to establish a working democracy. The movement to restore democracy had resulted in 1990 in an agreed commitment amongst all political forces to restore parliamentary democracy and to strengthen democratic institutions—the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a media committed fearlessly to truth and to give voice to the people. These aspirations for a transparent, responsive and accountable mode of governance were powerfully (…)

On November 7, 2009, veteran Pakistani journalist-cum-writer Mohammad Baqir Naqvi passed away in a Karachi hospital. Naqvi sahb was a prominent peace activist and crusader against nuclearisation of the Indo-Pak subcontinent. At the time of his death at the age of 81 he was busy writing a book on the Pakistan’s nuclear programme and foreign policy; the work, however, remains unfinished.
Born in Amroha in 1928 he, like countless Muslims, migrated to Pakistan after partition in 1947. He (…)

Recently the DRDO’s former senior scientist, Dr K. Santhanam, raised a controversy that the Pokhran-II test for thermonuclear device was unsuccessful and that fresh nuclear tests were necessary to face the threat from China. Two former Chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr P.K. Iyenger and Dr Homi Sethna, supported his contention. Whether Pokhran-II was successful or not is a question of science and technology. But whether fresh nuclear tests are necessary to meet the defence needs is (…)

Intellect, will and emotion, the powers of head, chest and heart with whom man as a conscious being has been endowed, will prove his undoing if, caught in the net of his concepts, in the brilliance of his achievements and in the web of his entanglements he forgets his anchorage in the weaving and working of the greater life.
—Karlfried Graf von Durkheim
Deeper ecological concerns and possible remedial measures need more than patchwork solutions. The thesis that it would be futile to (…)

Historians will indeed take a poor view of the national leadership in the critical days of 1992: a Prime Minister who was either naïve or incompetent and least interested in performing his constitutional and legal duties; an Opposition leader, who was, to say the least, a hypocrite, who had conceptualised and mobilised the people through his Rath Yatra and incited their fanaticism and then called December 6 the saddest day of his life; a senior colleague of his who was not only a (…)

Seventeen years after the Babri tragedy occurred, the Liberhan Report seems a bit of an anachronism and almost an unnecessaary irritant. The broad contours of the tragedly are no revelation to the country, the tragedy having been already deeply mourned as a fall from the country’s centuries’ long sanity or acclaimed as a grand assertion of Hindu valour and triumph over the minority abuse and desecration of the Hindu places of worship or sentiments which were subjects of or defeated by Muslim (…)

It has long been held that justice delayed is justice denied. The 16.5 years that the Liberhan Commission took to produce its report on the Babri Masjid demolition must, in that light, be called a travesty of justice. Why might it have taken so much longer than the three months it was allotted when it was appointed by the government of Narasimha Rao?
One reason that the Commission itself offered was that witnesses delayed making their appearances before it. It is entirely possible (…)

Our press and patriots made quite a splash to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s tragic death. As it happened, it was also, to significant sections among us, the 25th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. So the controversies will go on, the accusations not blunting the justifications. The violations of the time were as heinous as the loyalties were blind.
In the hurly-burly of the Indira Gandhi emotions, we barely noticed the 20th anniversary of an event (…)