Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• The Moral Highs of India’s “Cultural Nationalists”

  19 May 2007, by Badri Raina

  India’s Hindu Right-wing is currently in the moral doghouse. Curious fate for an ideological set-up that stridently claims proprietary rights to the terrain of “values”. It is another matter that some fifteen years after they razed the mosque at Ayodhya in a despicable act of profound irreligion, the more conscientious even among Hindu saints and sadhus now openly characterise the BJP as in fact an unprincipled jamboree of crass atheists for whom the building of the Ram temple has been (…)

• Democratic Colonialism

  19 May 2007, by P K Chatterjee

  If any political analyst looks askance as to what kind of a government can democratic colonialism be, he has only to study the Indian Constitution and its working. Its Preamble recites some basic slogans of republican democracy, its Part-III confers all kinds of fundamental rights to the citizens, its Part-IV gives highly laudable but unenforceable directives for state policies, and there the democracy part ends. The rest of the Constitution, in all essential particulars, is a reproduction (…)

• Yeltsin and Putin in Retrospect

  19 May 2007, by S Nihal Singh

  Between them, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union, the former out of the noblest of motives and the latter for opportunistic reasons. The West sang paeans of praise first for Gorbachev for his glasnost and perestroika, and later for Yeltsin for delivering the coup de grace to the Soviet Union. There was no job left for President Gorbachev because he had lost his country.
  Yet Yeltsin, who was laid to rest in the Novodevichy, together with the great poets and (…)

• We Need No Taliban Here

  19 May 2007, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  Maqbool Fida Hussain is at the very centre of a storm whose after-effects are extremely relevant for our democracy—both for the democratic structure of our state and for the preservation of democratic values in our society.
  It is not that Hussain is at the centre of a controversy for the first time; in fact, it is seldom he is out of one. He has got thousands of fans, not all because of the beauty of his art but quite a large number applauding him for what would have been called (…)

• Book Review: Understanding the Nuances of Development

  19 May 2007, by G Narasimha Raghavan

  Development Discourse: Issues and Concerns by T.K. Oommen; Regency Publications, New Delhi; 2004 .
  Back in 1965, Dudley Seers wondered aloud:
  What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have become less severe, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would (…)

• A Mature Response is the Need of the Hour

  19 May 2007, by Rajindar Sachar

  The threat held out to the judiciary by some politicians because of the interim stay of OBC quotas shows lack of maturity and understanding of the role of the judiciary in our constitutional set-up. Is it advisable to raise the pitch, however important the issue may be? After all, we are a civilised constitutional democracy and must proceed on the basis of bonafide action by each instrumentality of the state, however we may disagree with it.
  The charge that courts do not understand the (…)

• Union Budget 2007-08: An Exercise sans Realism

  19 May 2007, by A V V S K Rao

  The functional-financial theorists like Lord Keynes (Cambridge), Learner A.P. (London School of Economics) wanted public finance and the Budget to subserve the ends of macro-economics like growth in investment, employment, output and consumption etc., rejecting the classical advocacy of small and surplus Budgets. On the other hand, development-fiscal economists like Richard Musgrave (Harvard) and Stiglitz (Columbia) added the goals of capital formation, re-distributive justice, price (…)

• On Left Expansion in Hindi Speaking Region

  19 May 2007, by Syed Shahabuddin

  COMMUNICATION
  Apropos Shri Chaturanan Mishra’s article on the possibility of Left expansion in the Hindi speaking region [“For Left Expansion in the Hindi Region”, Mainstream Annual 2006 (December 23, 2006)], I have noticed the causes of stagnation mentioned by the writer. But behind it lies the fundamental lacuna in the approach of the Left movement which fails to recognise the primordial importance of religion and caste as deeply rooted social factors particularly in this region. To the (…)

• Neighbours in Foreign Policy

  14 May 2007, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  At two ends of our far-flung country, one witnesses today visible stirrings for a democratic order. In the east, Bangladesh is in the throes of a general election promising to end eleven long years of virtual army rule. In the west, Pakistan is going through the excitement of Benazir Bhutto’s tumultuous return, rousing democratic forces to a pitch which the Marital Law regime had not seen since her father’s overthrow in 1977.
  Significantly, at the helm of these democratic upsurges, (…)

• Correct Diagnosis of CPM’s Political Ailments

  14 May 2007, by A K Dasgupta

  COMMUNICATION
  Even nearly two decades back Nikhil Chakravartty correctly diagnosed the political ailments of the CPI-M when he wrote in his column in the Mainstream (August 25, 1990):
  Nobody denies that the Congress-I is a discredited outfit in West Bengal. But this by no means indicates a growing swing to the Left. Rather there is not only disenchantment but ramblings of discontent at the ground level. In this context, a ruling party can gain if it displays humility and an eagerness to (…)