Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Intolerance through the Years: 1934 to 1975 to 2015

  29 June 2015, by Anil Nauriya

  Day against Intolerance : June 25, 2015
  The 25th and 26th of June mark not only the declaration of the internal Emergency at the behest of the Indira Gandhi regime in 1975. June 25 is also the day in 1934 when a lethal bomb was aimed at Mahatma Gandhi and his cavalcade by the Hindu conservative and orth-odox elements in Pune when he was on his anti-untouchability tour. For some years, especially from 1977 onwards, the anniversary has been observed as a day of protest against the Emergency (…)

• Memories of Nikhilda during the Emergency

  29 June 2015, by Barun Das Gupta

  It was in the wee hours of Jun 26, 1975 — around 4.30. I was sleeping soundly when the telephone by my bedside started ringing. [I was then in Gauhati (spelt Guwahati now) working as Patriot’s Special Correspondent in Assam.] I woke up. I thought that the caller must have dialled a wrong number and decided not to take the call. After a couple of minutes the ringing stopped. I had just switched off my bed lamp and closed my eyes when the telephone started ringing again. This time it went on (…)

• Nikhilda! You Never Die!

  29 June 2015, by Anees Chishti

  June 25, 1975: 6 am: The telephone rings and there is the voice of a dear senior journalist friend—something that is not unusual as he often used to surprise me with some important information before the day started. But this was something that was extraordinary and would have been unbelievable if it had not come from him. I was told that late last night Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai had been woken up in their sleep and taken to some unknown place by the police. A little later came (…)

• Nikhil Babu Widened My Mental Horizon

  29 June 2015, by Girish Mishra

  It was in late 1959 that I met N.C. (Nikhil Chakravartty). I was sent by Comrade P. C. Joshi to deliver some document to him. At that time he had just started IPA (India Press Agency) and used to sit in the INS Building on Rafi Marg. When I met him, he expressed a great deal of warmth and asked me to meet him off and on. At that time I lived in North Avenue. My meetings with him began and I learnt a great deal from him. My mental horizon was widened. Whenever I came from Patna to Delhi, I (…)

• Nikhil Chakravartty, Our Contemporary

  29 June 2015

  by Nirupam Sen
  This month is Nikhi Chakravartty’s death anniversary. I have known very few journalists (perhaps my personal, idiosyncratic application of Lenin’s dictum: “Better fewer, but better”). Nikhil Chakravartty was among these few. I discussed some domestic and foreign policy issues with him often and, very occasionally, visited him at his Kaka Nagar flat. For me, too, the red door was intellectually welcoming, reassuring and opened to the Left. For him too, as for Robert Burns, (…)

• Nikhilda, the True Intellectual

  29 June 2015

  by Jaya Jaitly
  When a good person is no longer in our midst the feelings they leave with, and the aura of their personality remains like a soft breeze in one’s life. There are many ways in which people touch the lives of others, and as I remember Nikhil Chakravartty, I recall his intellectual purity, gentleness, and honesty in friendships. An intellectual is a loaded word and I have written at length about many current-day intellectuals as conceited and opinionated people who believe their (…)

• Praful Bidwai Is No More

  29 June 2015

  As we go to press, we have received the sad news that independent Left activist-intellectual and noted journalist Praful Bidwai, 66, has suddenly passed away on June 23 in Amsterdam where he had gone for the Transnational Institute Fellows’ Meeting (he was a Fellow there).
  For sometime in the recent past he was working on a project on the Indian Left at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. The work has been completed and the book is due soon.
  He worked in The Times of India for (…)

• Shillong: A Tale of Blue Love

  29 June 2015

  by Nabanipa Bhattacharjee
  Thousands of people forced their way into the Dimapur Central Jail—Dimapur is a fairly large, commercial town in Nagaland—on March 5, 2015 to get hold of one Syed Sarifuddin Khan, a Bangla-speaking Muslim man in his mid-thirties, in order to punish him for the alleged rape of a Naga woman. In complete disregard of the jail authority, the mob then dragged the man through the streets of the town and beat him to death. The dead Khan, then, was hung on a tower for (…)

• ‘Modigate’, BJP, Advani

  20 June 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  Corruption has now raised its ugly head in the present ruling party as details of the close connections of that celebrated fugitive evading questioning by the Enforcement Directorate, Lalit Modi, with a senior member in the Narendra Modi Cabinet, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, and a noted Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, of BJP-ruled Rajasthan have come out in the open. And this has happened shortly after the Modi Government completed its one-year rule proudly claiming (…)

• Left Perspective, CPI-M and a Corrigendum

  20 June 2015

  The following is the letter from the CPI-M General Secretary to the Mainstream editor (June 15, 2015):
  Dear Mr Sumit Chakravartty,
  As the Editor of Mainstream Weekly, you had published an Editorial “Left Perspective Today” in Volume LIII (53), No. 20 on 09.05.2015 and which continues to be available at http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article5668.html. The Editorial contains an assertion which is false, baseless and malicious and is intended to defame the CPI-M as a political party in the (…)