Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tribute to Daya Varma

  12 April 2015

  Dr Daya Varma, life-long communist, scientist, activist, dreamer, pharmacologist, professor emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, passed away on March 22, 2015 in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. He was born on August 23, 1929. A former member of the undivided Communist Party of India, he was a founder of the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) and International South Asia Forum, as well as a founding member of CERAS (Centre d’Étude et Ressources d’Asie Sud) and was on (…)

• Uzbek Presidential Poll: Islam Karimov, the Unchallenged Leader of Uzbekistan

  12 April 2015

  by R.G. Gidadhubli
  During the last over two decades since the Soviet break-up, having given up 70 years of communist ideology and adopting the Western system of political democracy and market economy, all the 15 sovereign and independent states of the former USSR have been regularly holding presidential elections. On March 30, 2015, the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan declared the result of its presidential election held on March 26, according to which Islam Karimov was declared elected (…)

• Ever More Gas

  12 April 2015, by Mukul Dube

  We are to believe that the ass is actually a horse because Modi and his people choose to call it that.
  In the months since Narendra Damodardas Modi campaigned for the general election and then became the Prime Minister, there has been a barrage of claims and statements from him and his team which a young friend describes as an enormous, unceasing release of gas. If the analogy is taken further, the object of the flatulence seems to be to so envelop us in a foul miasma as to render us (…)

• Where Are We Heading?

  5 April 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  While the Aam Aadmi Party’s squabbles have snowballed with the summary expulsion of two of its founder-members—Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan—and some other leading figures in the party, like Anand Kumar and Ajit Jha, also meeting a similar fate, the organisation’s internal Lokpal Admiral L. Ramdas (Retd) too was suddenly removed from his post on March 29. In a dignified letter to the party the same evening, Admiral Ramdas wrote:
  It is with grreat surprise and sadness that (…)

• Modi Government builds Tempo for National Law Banning Conversions to Christianity

  5 April 2015, by John Dayal

  The Indian Government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national Capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s senior Ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent. Civil rights groups have recorded 168 incidents of targeted violence against the (…)

• Free Trade Faults: Europeans Fear Wave of Litigation from US Firms

  5 April 2015

  by Christoph Pauly
  With broad public resistance and a Euro-pean Parliament majority against it, EU officials are rethinking their positions on the proposed free-trade agreement with Washington. Many fear investor protection rules will wreak havoc on national laws.
  When Bernd Lange talks about the advantages of a free trade agreement with the US, he often cites the example of the VW bus. The hippy favourite has been the target of a 25 per cent tariff since 1964, a punitive move after the (…)

• Saffronisation of Secularism

  5 April 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Not many in Pakistan, still fewer in India, recalled that this March 23 marked the 75th year of the Muslim League’s resolution to demand partition of India. The Lahore resolution, as it was called, said: “That no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may (…)

• Debating a Post-Westphalian International Order

  5 April 2015

  by Jayabrata Sarkar
  Over the past three-and-a-half centuries, the principles and practices of the Westphalian Treaty (1648) gradually spread from Europe to the rest of the world. The Westphalian order assumed a vital importance for three main reasons. First, it secularised international politics by divorcing it from any particular religious footing, anchoring it instead on the tenets of national interest and reasons of state. Second, it promoted sovereignty, the legal doctrine that no (…)

• Where is the Ghar to Return when it is Unjustly Occupied?

  5 April 2015, by Ambrose Pinto

  The SCs/STs are recognised as indigenous people of the country. They constitute more than 25 per cent of the country’s population. However, at the United Nations, the Government of India had consistently denied existence or applicability of the concept of “indigenous peoples” to these groups though the country had voted in their favour at the General Assembly on September 13, 2007. India is also a signatory to the International Labour Organisation Convention concerning the Protection and (…)

• Forsaken at Home : Repertoire of Displacement

  5 April 2015

  by Shubhra Seth
  The feeling of returning home gives a sense of respite and belonging to many. But how does one feel when the home does not give a sense of belonging and it is just a mere lifeless structure that one returns to every day, for the simple reason that, what was once upon a time their home, today no longer welcomes them? The Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) live with this dilemma every day. Living in relief colonies or camps, their condition is similar to that of refugees as (…)