Mainstream Weekly

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• Bhagat Singh as I knew Him

  22 March 2015, by Ajoy Ghosh

  Legendary freedom fighter and martyr Bhagat Singh’s birth centenary was observed on September 28, 2007. On the occasion of the eightyfourth anniversary of his martyrdom, we are reproducing the following article (published earlier in Mainstream) in homage to the outstanding revolutionary hero’s abiding memory. He was executed along with Sukhdev and Rajguru in Lahore on March 23, 1931. He was and remains to this day a source of inspiration for our youth. This article carries excerpts from Ajoy (…)

• Greece - Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis: Europe and the Future for Syriza Government

  22 March 2015, by Harsh Kapoor

  by Harsh Kapoor
  Let us begin with some jottings from history. In our imagination Greece occupies the bedrock of key Western ideas with its first city states and the idea of democracy, but that was ancient Greece. Modern Greece, as we know, has had an important place in Europe after it emerged breaking free from the Ottoman empire in the 1820s with the intervention of France, Britain and Russia. A very poor and essentially rural country then with a limited state under the deep sway of (…)

• Can Modi Rejuvenate Ganga?

  22 March 2015

  by Manoj Misra
  can Modi rejuvenate Ganga?
  —No and Yes.
  —No, if business as usual (BAU) remains the norm. BAU involves high rhetoric, photo ops, poor understanding, emphasis on engineering solutions, little accountability, public suffering and apathy.
  —Yes, shall obviously require a negation of all that defines a BAU approach and more.
  It is not that the governments preceding the current one did nothing. Ganga and Yamuna Action Plans (GAP and YAP) were put into operation as (…)

• We are all Mukto-mona

  22 March 2015, by Subhash Gatade

  “Our aim is to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science.” — Avijit Roy
  “Dr Dabholkar, who was fighting against super-stition, was assassinated because he was a rationalist. All such people, who have embarked upon a path of reason and rationalism, propa-gated these ideas, had to make tremendous (…)

• Jagmati Sangwan — A Committed Social Reformer

  22 March 2015, by Ranbir Singh

  WOMEN’S WORLD
  Born on January 2, 1960 at village Butana of Sonipat district, Jagmati Sangwan, General Secretary, All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), may be legitimately acknowledged as a committed social reformer. She had to operate in a State characterised by the paradox of economic development and social regression.
  Haryana has been able to emerge as one of the most developed States of the Indian Union on account of the success of the Green Revolution and White Revolution (…)

• Remembering Narayan Bhai Desai

  22 March 2015, by Devaki Jain

  TRIBUTE
  Narayan Bhai was one of the most persistent Bhais from the Gandhian biradari that I have ever met—I dallied a great deal with Gandhians and Gandhian institutions starting way back in the fifties when I joined Vinoba Bhave in his padayatra. Then the whole world of the Patwardhans, including visiting Achyutji in Varanasi, travelling on a train with JP and Prabhaben—all were part of my journey: in and out of the Gandhian biradari. We could not meet Narayan Bhai without a mention of (…)

• CBI Court Summons Manmohan Singh

  14 March 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  As we go to press news has come that Congress leaders, with party President Sonia Gandhi in the foreground, marched this morning from the Akbar Road central headquarters of the Congress to former PM Manmohan Singh’s residence in Lutyens’ Delhi in a demonstrative show of solidarity with the erstwhile head of the Union Government who was yesterday summoned by a special CBI court as an accused in a case of alleged illegal allocation of a coal block to Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Hindalco (…)

• Vinod Mehta, On His Own Terms

  14 March 2015, by John Dayal

  TRIBUTE
  In India, we never speak ill of the dead. Those who reviled Vinod Mehta, the founder-editor of Outlook news-weekly, in his lifetime, accusing him of being a courtier of 10, Janpath, the political euphemism for Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Indian National Congress, an apologist for a “secular” civil society, are now singing high praises for the editor who passed away on March 8, 2015 of multiple organ failure. He was 73, and is survived by his wife Sumita Paul, also a (…)

• Reflections of a Socialist Feminist

  14 March 2015, by Nandita Haksar

  The following article was written for Mainstream on the occasion of the International Women’s Day (March 8) but could not be used earlier as it reached us late.
  I was sitting with a migrant worker from Manipur and played the song ‘Bread and Roses’ to her. The images with the song were of women fighting for an eight-hour day. I asked how she liked the song; but she had been watching the images and asked: “Did the women get an eight- hour day?” “Yes, at the time they did.” “But I work a (…)

• Towards Emotional Integration

  14 March 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Power makes strange bedfellows. Mufti Mohmmad Sayeed, who heads the Jammu and Kashmir Government, has joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yet his victory in the State Assembly elections has been primarily on the plank that he will not allow the BJP to enter the Valley. That he has gone back on the electoral promise is not any different from what leaders of other political parties do.
  Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah sounds churlish when he says that the (…)