Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• BJP depending on Mind Game to win the Bihar Elections

  20 September 2015

  by Arun Srivastava
  The announcement of elections to the Bihar Assembly has not brought any significant change in the electoral battle but by the time voters finally elect their representatives, the rural Bihar would be witnessing the worst kind of social strife. With the electoral battle turning out to be crucial for survival for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, it is obvious that muscle power would fly high.
  It has been quite clear from the beginning (…)

• Saffronising the Institutions

  20 September 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Understandably, there is a sense of horror over the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s decision to ‘modernise’ the Jawaharlal Nehru Museum at Teen Murti in New Delhi. The BJP spokesman has explained that the present museum tells only the Nehru side of national struggle for independence, not the entire story.
  Ironically, the persons to put forward the demand are those who did not contribute even a bit to the national movement. Their role, if any, helped the British rulers.
  What the BJP (…)

• Unique Challenges of Our Times

  20 September 2015, by Bharat Dogra

  The uniqueness of the 21st century is that the most crucial issues of sustaining human life and innumerable other species are likely to be decided within this century.
  Within the 21st century it is likely that the most critical time for decision-taking is here and now. The present generation and possibly the next one have to implement the most important decisions for the survival of most of the life-forms on earth.
  Life in various forms has existed on earth for hundreds of millions of (…)

• Left in Kerala: Have the Comrades abandoned Serious Introspection?

  20 September 2015

  by Suresh Jnaneswaran
  Listening is a virtue that comrades should assiduously cultivate. The distinction between listening and hearing has been pithily characte-rised by Roland Barthes as, “Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act”. Is listening to the petite bourgeois or non-card holder anathematic to the comrades self-esteem? Should an oracular posture of infallibility run them down over the Indian subcontinental landscape?
  Change is the essence of history (…)

• Blow to Afghan Peace

  20 September 2015, by Harish Chandola

  The recent car-and-truck bomb attacks in Kabul, killing several, and the Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani’s demand that Pakistan crack down on the Taliban, appear to have ended the prospects of peace in that country generated by the July meeting between an Afghan Govern-ment delegation and senior leaders of Taliban insurgency in Murree in Pakistan. By holding that meeting, the Afghan President had taken steps to improve relations with Pakistan, whose influence he hoped would sway the Taliban. (…)

• SCO’s Growing Role in the International Scene

  20 September 2015

  by Hasan Hamidullah
  The last SCO summit, which took place in Ufa (Russia) on July 9 and 10, was held in a highly deteriorating international situation, the worst of its kind since the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001. The results of the agreements, concluded and signed at Ufa, testified to the major role the Organisation has been playing as a multilateral platform intended to discuss the most burning questions concerning the global political and economic (…)

• Valuable Contribution to a Multilateral World Order

  20 September 2015

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Vijay Kumar
  Force or Dialogue : Conflicting Paradigms of World Order by Hans Kochler with a Foreword by Fred Dallmayr—Collected Papers edited by David Armstrong; 2015; Manak Publications, Delhi; pages 401, Price: Rs 2500.
  The book under review represents an assiduous effort on the part of Professor Hans Kochler, one of the most distinguished scholars/ practitioners of international law and philo-sophy, to interrogate the growing contradictions between normative and (…)

• VS, Corbyn and Democratic Centralism

  20 September 2015, by M K Bhadrakumar

  An extraordinary thing happened in the Left politics in Britain and in the southern State of Kerala last week. There are similarities and dissimilarities between what happened in the two situations so far apart. But it gives much food for thought for all Leftist workers and their leaders as well as the fellow-travellers of the Left in India.
  The stunning victory of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party in UK on September 12 made headlines in the world media. Corbyn won despite (…)

• Mulayam Singh Yadav and BJP

  20 September 2015

  Communication
  Despite the Samajwadi Party supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tall talk of being a great champion of socialism, standard-bearer of secula-rism and great crusader against communalism, his decision of quitting the grand secular alliance in Bihar is nothing but a clear move of his closeness to and having a secret deal with the BJP which is implementing the RSS agenda of making India a Hindu country and establishing here a state based on Hindutva. The following instances justify the (…)

• Implications of RSS-BJP Samanvay Baithak

  20 September 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Soon after the mid-term poll in 1998, when the results were yet to come but one was certain that the BJP and its allies would form the next government at the Centre, a political leader who later joined the A.B. Vajpayee-led Union Ministry, had asked this correspondent as to what should be done after the outcome of the elections. One had then clearly pointed out to him that regardless of what course the BJP-led government would follow (that is, a Right-of-Centre line or a (…)