Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Yechury and the Kerala Selfie

  2 May 2015

  by Appukuttan Vallikunnu
  The election of Sitaram Yechury as the CPM’s General Secretary without a contest is significant in one aspect. It is a small beginning of that party’s rectification process. First, a victory for those who waged an inner-party struggle against a personalised leadership in the 21st Congress of the CPI-M. A leadership based on personal whims and fancies.
  The party is in for an organisational plenum to correct its big organisational mistakes within six months. One (…)

• I give you the Bullet Train

  2 May 2015, by Badri Raina

  Are you hungry, are you in pain? Come, I’ll feed you the bullet train. Have you no roof ov’r your head? Are you directly under the rain? Come, jump into the bullet train. Are you on foot, pursued apace By rapist, moralist, policeman’s cane? Just one way to cheat them all— Ride away in the bullet train. The bullet train is quick and fast, It leaves behind the ugly things In such rapid tryst with development, You’d think they never did exist. Are you a farmer with noose in hand, (…)

• ’Opposition-mukt Bharat’ is a Dangerous Thesis. Is Yechury up to the Task of Defeating it?

  2 May 2015, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Outside of religious faith-lines, can the dead be brought to life again? The principal commu-nist grouping in India, the CPI-M, was so systematically destroyed during the Prakash Karat years that it would be difficult to imagine it becoming relevant in Indian politics again. In the larger view of things, this is unfortunate because a country as diverse as India must have a Left-Right-Centre party architecture for democracy to be meaningful. The BJP’s proclaimed policy of a (…)

• Jyoti Basu’s Bombshell

  2 May 2015, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  Now that the CPI-M’s 21st Congress at Visakhapatnam is over and Sitaram Yechury has been elected as the new General Secretary of the party throwing the dominant party leadership’s plans in jeopardy, we once again remember the CPM patriarch, Jyoti Basu, by reproducing N.C.’s following article which appeared in Mainstream (January 18, 1997) bringing out the issues that were raised by Jyoti Basu’s press interview that was published on Janaury 1, 1997 and came as a (…)

• Reimagining Strategy, Returning To Grassroots : Challenges before Yechury

  2 May 2015, by Praful Bidwai

  The election of Sitaram Yechury as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist is noteworthy not least because the CPM, with one million members, is the world’s second largest Communist Party (after the Chinese), but also because it comes at a make-or-break moment in the nine decades-long history of the communist movement in India.
  Whether and how ably Yechury is able to stem the decline of his crisis-ridden party and rejuvenate and energise it will greatly influence the (…)

• Unprecedented Development, Stupendous Task

  2 May 2015, by Barun Das Gupta

  Something happened at the 21st Congress of the CPI-M at Visakhapatnam that had never happened in the party Congress of any Communist Party perhaps anywhere in the world and certainly not in India. The name suggested by the outgoing party General Secretary Prakash Karat as his successor, that of S. Ramachandran Pillai, was not acceptable to the majority of the delegates. Their combined pressure on the party leadership was so great that Karat had to ask Ramachandran Pillai to opt out of the (…)

• Importance of being Rahul Gandhi

  2 May 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Rahul Gandhi is in the news for one reason or the other. Yesterday, the debate was on his 57-day leave of absence from the country. In fact, Rahul himself should have told about his passion for chanting if that is what he was doing in Myanmar. That the party leaders, except her mother Sonia Gandhi and Congress President, have preferred to make his absence as his private affair does not help.
  Public leaders have no private life once they are in the people’s domain. People like their leaders (…)

• Kashmir: Masarat Alam, My Neighbour

  2 May 2015

  by Mohan K. Tikku
  The locality in Srinagar where Masarat Alam Bhat—who has been much in the news these past few weeks— comes from is where I once used to have my home: Zaindar Mohalla. It used to be a place where the two communities had lived cheek by jowl for generations. In those halcyon days, the mutual sharing and caring was something that happened even without anybody noticing it. The marriages of the daughters of some of our Muslim neighbours, for example, were performed in our house (…)

• Dr Ambedkar’s 125th Birth Anniversary — The Real Tribute

  2 May 2015, by Rajindar Sachar

  All newspapers on April 15, 2015 were full of all parties in the country, though normally at each other’s throat, vying with each other in their full-throated praise for Dr Ambedkar as one of the greatest Indian leaders of the country. The tribute to Dr Ambedkar is fully deserved, but one is sceptical of the genuineness and sincerity of this by most of these parties. Though the average person in the country unhesitatingly and rightly accepts him as the leader in framing our Constitution, all (…)

• Pakistan Declines to Send Troops to Yemen: Danger of US-Iran conflict

  2 May 2015, by Harish Chandola

  Pakistan’s ties with its Saudi Arabia ally have come under great strain. The Saudis, who have been bombing the Houthi people in Yemen in the south for over a month, have failed to subdue or make peace with them. In spite of its enormous defence budget, the Saudi Army considers itself inadequate to launch a ground offensive in neighbouring Yemen. It had therefore asked for troops from Pakistan to battle the Houthis, a large Yemeni Shi’a tribe, which not only captured its capital, Sanaa, but (…)