Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• A “family matter”? Caste-patriarchy-politics nexus in a case of illegal adoption in Kerala | Kalyani Menon Sen, Nivedita Menon, JM Rugma, Cynthia Stephen, Enakshi Ganguly

  11 March 2022, by Cynthia Stephen, Enakshi Ganguly, JM Rugma, Kalyani Menon Sen, Nivedita Menon

  I. Background
  This note is a product of our effort to investigate the “Kerala illegal adoption case” where a new-born infant was forcibly snatched and handed over to an adoption agency by the mother’s family, against the mother’s will and without her consent. When all her attempts to recover the child through appeals to the authorities failed, the mother Anupama Chandran started a fast outside the State Secretariat and took her story to the media. Activists and women’s groups joined her (…)

• Pakistan’s ’Aurat March’ 2022: To be or not to be | Nadra Huma Quraishi

  11 March 2022

  March 6, 2022 by Nadra Huma Quraishi On March 8, women around the world mark a day they call their own — International Women’s Day, highlighting achievements and dialoguing about issues still unresolved. The Women’s Day theme this year is #BreakTheBias, underscoring the idea that it is not enough to acknowledge the existence of bias. Action is necessary to achieve equality.
  While the rest of the world is devising strategies to improve conditions for women, Pakistani women face the (…)

• Are ’Low-Calibre Men’ India’s Destiny? | TJS George

  11 March 2022, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Winston Churchill hated India. Which was natural because his mind was mutilated by imperialism, so he couldn’t understand why the stupid Indians agitated for independence.
  Rudyard Kipling had no such problem. Being a poet, he took a philosophical view of the world and agreed that "East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet." If that reality had been accepted by both East and West, a great deal of the world’s problems could have been avoided. (…)

• Alternative to Narendra Modi: Is Mamata Banerjee the answer? | K N Ninan

  11 March 2022

  by K N Ninan *
  While Indians await the results of the ongoing assembly elections to gauge which way the wind is blowing in the country, either for or against the ruling BJP, both BJP and opposition leaders have started manoeuvring in preparation for the 2024 general elections in the country. While the Modi government talks of ‘Amrit Kaal’, opposition leaders such as Mamata Banerjee and K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) have taken the initiative to form an anti-BJP front to take on the ruling BJP (…)

• Significant Gains Achieved After Long Struggle by Construction Workers Are Threatened Now | Bharat Dogra

  11 March 2022, by Bharat Dogra

  Very significant gains were achieved by construction workers of India in the form of two laws enacted in 1996 for their social security and welfare. Then for over two decades another phase of struggle had to continue for their implementation in the right spirit. By the year 2018 again there were significant successes in the form of decisions of Supreme Court and High Courts for proper implementation. Just when it appeared that the promising laws and the significant gains they could bring to (…)

• Assembly Elections: Missing NEP in the Debate | Prem Singh

  11 March 2022, by Prem Singh

  The assembly elections of five, which lasted for about a month, are going to end. Only last phase of the elections is left in Uttar Pradesh to be held on March 7. Much of the debate during the elections was lost to accusations and counter-accusations between the parties and leaders. In the debate on election issues that appeared in newspapers, magazines, online, social media and TV channels, no discussions were heard on the New Education Policy (NEP). I personally inquired and also asked (…)

• Understanding the Phenomenon of ‘Criminal Politicians’ in Uttar Pradesh Elections | Amitanshu Verma

  11 March 2022

  by Amitanshu Verma *
  Abstract
  In the ongoing Uttar Pradesh assembly elections the focus is yet again on ‘criminal politicians.’ Almost every other speech teems with invocation of words like mafia, bahubali and tamancha-wadi. As the incumbent BJP goes to polls it highlights controlling the mafia politicians, as one of its prime achievements in the last five years. This essay provides a brief historical sketch of the rise of the figure of ‘criminal politician’ and the discourse of (…)

• The Return of Mandal Rhetorics in UP Politics | Supriy Ranjan and Pankaj Kumar

  11 March 2022

  by Supriy Ranjan and Pankaj Kumar *
  Mandal politics signified a paradigmatic shift in Indian politics. It completely changed the physicality as well as the language of doing politics. The Parliament and state assemblies, for the first time, mirrored cleavages and antagonisms of Indian society. It is in this sense that Mandal politics signified the deepening of democracy in India. While much analysis has focused on the representational democratisation that this politics brought in. The (…)

• Thanatos Triumphant | Mike Davis (NLR - Sidecar)

  11 March 2022

  07 March 2022
  by Mike Davis
  Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheiks, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds. What I find most remarkable about these strange days ­– as thermobaric bombs melt shopping malls and fires rage in nuclear reactors – is the inability of our supermen to validate their power in any plausible narrative of the near future.
  By (…)

• The 2022 War in Ukraine - Interview with Oksana Dutchak

  11 March 2022

  5 Mar 2022
  Oksana Dutchak is a researcher based in Ukraine and an activist of E.A.S.T. – Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. She tells about the current ever-changing situation in Ukraine and local attempts of self-organization to cope with the war. The question of how to create a transnational politics of peace has no easy answer. Continuing to mobilize and communicate across the borders is crucial but it should go hand in hand with radically rethinking the transnational itself. (…)