Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, May 4, 2024

  4 May 2024

  Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, May 4, 2024
  India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be leading the show and outshining all with his hateful & divisive speeches in the 2024 national election campaign. Starting with his speech on April 21 at Banswada, Rajasthan where he expressly named ‘the Muslims’ alluding to them as infiltrators and as ones who produce more children and making wildly misleading claims on the opposition Congress party came in for widespread criticism in (…)

• The False Feel-Good About Indian Economy’s Performance Since 2014 | Arun Kumar

  4 May 2024, by Arun Kumar

  The ruling party is in election mode with daily pronouncements about how well the Indian economy is doing and benefitting not just the well-off but also the poor in the country. It has claimed a big reduction in poverty in India. It is stated that the Indian economy growing at about 7% is the fastest growing large economy in the world. Further, inflation is said to be tamed and employment generation robust, in spite of global head winds due to the Ukraine war and the pandemic.
  It is (…)

• Repeated Violations of the Constitution by the Modi regime & A People’s Movement to Make “Save the Constitution”an Electoral Issue | S.N. Sahu

  4 May 2024, by S N Sahu

  The INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) alliance partners consisting of several opposition parties met in Mumbai on 1st September 2023 and declared, among others, that they came together to save the Constitution and democracy from the relentless onslaught of BJP and Modi regime. Little did they realise at that time that the issue of saving the Constitution would become a key electoral issue in the 2024 general elections and Dalits, scheduled tribes, Other Backward (…)

• India’s Chromium Boom: Ecological Concerns and Social Imbalances | S N Tripathy

  4 May 2024, by S N Tripathy

  In 2020, India ascended fourth in global chrome production, trailing behind South Africa, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Finland. Chrome is a crucial component in stainless steel manufacturing and plays a pivotal role in industrial development. Nevertheless, the exponential surge in chrome production in India, particularly in the Sukinda Valley of Jajpur, has spawned a complex web of social, economic, and environmental challenges.
  As of 2020, India’s chrome production reached 3.929 thousand (…)

• Supreme Court Needs to Relook at the EVM-VVPAT Judgement | Sandeep Pandey

  4 May 2024, by Sandeep Pandey

  The Supreme Court in its judgement has backed the system of Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) that is used in India for conducting elections and simply refused to consider the option of going back to ballot paper. The inherent argument is that technology has improved a number of things like precluding the possibility of bogus voting, eliminating human errors, reduction in time in counting of votes, etc. and if anything, technology should be (…)

• How India uses national interest as a smokescreen to muzzle the media | Simran Agarwal

  4 May 2024

  The Indian government is weaponising ‘national interest’ measures to close down reporting it deems critical of the Modi government.
  The idea of a squadron of government officials storming a newsroom to shut down news-gathering and seize laptops and phones of journalists would send shivers up the spine of anyone who values a free and open democracy.
  However, the current Indian government routinely uses national interest as a smokescreen to raid news houses critical of it.
  In 2023, the (…)

• 2024 General Elections: Frustration leads to Desperation | JP Gadkari

  4 May 2024, by J P Gadkari

  May 2, 2024
  It is said that when frustratiion sets in, people get desparate and indulge in making illogical moves, talk about events twisting things out of context or indulge in telling blatant lies and repeatedly defend those lies..
  We can see this happening in the case of our Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the time his own Govt’s intelligence sources started reporting to him that the picture emerging throughout the country in general as far as election 2024 prospects (…)

• India’s First Metadata case: Why Prashant Kishor is wrong about Aadhaar Number Online Database Part 6 | Gopal Krishna

  4 May 2024, by Gopal Krishna

  "I have a file on you." M. K. Narayanan’s routine threat to his adversaries as National Security Adviser (NSA) quoted in Sanjay Baru’s book ’The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh’
  "One way to ensure that the unique identification (UID) number is used by all government and private agencies is by inserting it into the birth certificate of the infant. Since the birth certificate is the original identity document, it is likely that this number will then (…)

• Wave of Pro-Palestinian Student Protests in American Universities and the Crackdown on these | Soma Marla

  4 May 2024, by Soma S. Marla

  Students across the United States in campuses from Columbia to Emory to California are protesting in solidarity with Palestine. Protests expressing anguish about Israeli genocide are now spilling over to university campuses in Paris and other European universities as well. Police in the USA are brutally pounding protesting students and arresting them. Administration in Universities are calling state police, evacuating protesters from campuses and expelling dozens of students. But young (…)

• Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Break out of exclusive ethno-nationalism for transversal solidarities across borders | Nira Yuval Davis

  4 May 2024

  I watched and listened to Naomi Klein’s speech at the People’s Seder and her call for American Jews’ exodus from Zionism in NYC[[https://naomiklein.org/we-need-an-exodus-from-zionism] and felt nostalgic and sad. When I first left Israel in 1969 to the USA and discovered Jews, including a reform Rabbi, who defined their Jewishness in fighting against the Vietnam War rather than by keeping kosher or supporting Israeli Occupation, I felt elated. Till then I saw the range of choice of Jewishness (…)