Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• To Question Or Not To Question: That Is The Question

  27 December 2014

  The following is a slightly expanded version of the text of the Third Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture, organised by the Book Review Literary Trust, in New Delhi on October 26, 2014. Prof Romila Thapar has edited and expanded the text. It is being reproduced, with due acknowledgement, from the Book Review. A recorded version of the lecture is available at http://www.sacw.net/article9874.html and at ndtv.com
  by Romila Thapar
  Deciding on a topic for this lecture has been problematic. (…)

• Republic at Crossroads: Who is at the Wheel?

  27 December 2014, by Badri Raina

  I cannot recall if political India has ever before had a more momentously contentious ending to a calendar year.
  I say “political India” advisedly, because much that seems to be now culturally fraught is at bottom purely political in intent. And, with a vengeance it would seem.
  In an earlier article (“Troubled Times for the Constitutiional Republic,” Mainstream, August 30, 2014) I had speculated that consequent upon the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the general elections, a (…)

• Tragedy And Conciliation

  27 December 2014, by Kuldip Nayar

  There was genuine pain in India over the mindless killing of schoolchildren at Peshawar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked all Indian schoolchildren to maintain a two-minute silence in memory of the lives lost in Pakistan. He readily offered any assistance that India could render to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Such gestures transcend the borders. I wish this atmosphere could sustain between the two countries.
  Unfortunately, the civil societies in India and Pakistan don’t feel concerned (…)

• FDI increase in Insurance is Anti-National

  27 December 2014, by Rajindar Sachar

  The Modi Government has decided to introduce a Bill to allow increase of FDI from 26 per cent to 49 per cent in insurance. Outwardly the Congress and the other constituents of the erstwhile UPA Government are threatening to oppose it—though ironically, it was opposed by the BJP when the Congress-led UPA Government proposed it earlier. The enormity of the hypocrisy by both the major political groups hits you in the eye.
  In 1956, the Congress, to strengthen its position in the 1957 general (…)

• Indian Police

  27 December 2014

  COMMUNICATION
  All countrymen rightly condemn and resent the highly deplorable, thoroughly inefficient and corrupt Indian Police and its functioning.
  It has earned notoriety for adopting the immensely inhuman torturous three-degree methods leading to custodial death, resorting to fake encounters, production of fabricated evidence in the courts, arresting innocent Indian citizens and keeping them for months as under-trials and for taking bribes. It is full of anti- Muslim bias and (…)

• The Confidentiality Clause And Fighting Black Money At Home

  27 December 2014

  by Pranjit Agarwala
  The confidentiality clause in the Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAA) does prevent the Government of India from making public the identity of account holders without prima-facie evidence of wrong-doing. It, however, does not put restrictions on providing the relevant information to a court during legal proceedings or to an administrative body concerned with the matter. Nor does it restrain the Government of India from cracking down on black money within the country. (…)

• Foreign Currency Derivatives — A Sophisticated Loot?

  27 December 2014

  by Vahidha Nizam
  A sophisticated loot of more than one lakh crores of rupees through ‘foreign currency derivatives’, is alleged to have been aided and abetted by the Indian banks. Under the garb of a benign taxonomy ‘foreign currency derivatives’ Indian corporate and SMEs have been subjected to phenomenal losses that would add upto more than one lakh crore rupees. SBI and 18 other Indian private and foreign banks in India have allegedly acted as the obsequious agents of the foreign (…)

• Dimensions of Progressive Politics: The Indian Context

  27 December 2014

  by T.K. Oommen
  What is reckoned as ‘progressive’ depends on the benchmark from which we start and the combination of factors which we take into account. The 20th century witnessed three models: (1) Capitalism, multi-party democracy and nation-state. (2) Socialism, one-party system and multi-national state. (3) Regulated or limited capitalism drawn from the second model and multi-party democracy from the first model and national state usually referred to as the third way adopted by India. (…)

• India’s Foreign Trade Deficit, Rupee Slide and the Fraud of Modern Economics

  27 December 2014, by B P Mathur

  The intense pressure being applied on India to sign the WTO’s trade facilitation agreement, sidetracking India’s legitimate concern of food security, shows the hard reality of international economic relations. Indian policy-makers fail to realise that behind the sophistry of international diplomacy, the Western countries are vigorously pursuing their agenda of finding markets for their products to give a boost to their stagnating economies. Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas C Schelling (…)

• Gandhi’s Champaran Struggle

  27 December 2014, by Girish Mishra

  Two epoch-making events took place in 1917. The first was the Bolshevik Revolution in November that ended the Czarist rule over Russia and heralded the dawn of socialism in the world. The second event that did not immediately appear very important to people outside its locale proved to be the beginning of the end of foreign rule over India and sounded the death-knell of British imperialism. It took place in Champaran, a district of Bihar, about which not much was then known in other parts of (…)