Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Political Significance Of The Local Body Polls (2020) In Kerala | M R Biju and M R B Anantha Padmanabha

  26 December 2020

  by Prof. (Dr.) M. R. Biju and M.R.B.Anantha Padmanabha
  Prelude
  Article 243 E and 243 U of the Constitution of India deals with the question of duration of Panchayats and Municipalities and periodicity of elections to the rural and urban local bodies. It says “Every Panchayat/Municipality unless sooner dissolved under any law for the time being in force shall continue for five years from the date appointed its first meeting and no longer”. This constitutional provision also prohibits any (…)

• Modi on the mission to finish the farmers’ agitation | Arun Srivastava

  26 December 2020

  by Arun Srivastava
  The much publicised December 25 meeting of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi with the agitating farmers proved to be a non-event. An impression was created that the exercise undertaken on the birthday of the former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was a serious attempt to diffuse the impasse. But in reality it simply aggravated the situation and made the farmers harden their attitude. Today’s Modi’s assertion has made them disillusioned and are now sure that he was (…)

• Conquest of Agrifarm | Sardar Amjad Ali

  26 December 2020, by Sardar Amjad Ali

  In the Covid pandemic and December winter of Northern India, a few lakh peasants and farmers have organised a protest march towards the national capital demanding the repeal of the 3 anti-farmer legislations recently enacted by the Modi Government. It is perhaps an unprecedented event in free India and the largest peasant revolt in the world ever, when the tillers of the soil and the occupants of the farmhouses have been forced to abdicate their traditional occupation for begging justice (…)

• 

  Letter to India’s Minister of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare from Indian Economists for Equality

  26 December 2020

  December 22, 2020.
  To,
  Mr. Narendra Singh Tomar,
  Honourable Minister of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare,
  Government of India.
  Re: Request to repeal the recent Farm Acts.
  Dear Shri Narendra Singh Tomar ji,
  As economists who have a deep engagement with India (we are a group of around 40 economists from across the world who work on the Indian economy), and who desire a fair distribution of income and wealth in the country, we are seriously concerned about the recent Farm Acts (…)

• 

  Repeal The Farm Acts Statement by Radical Socialist (Dec 20, 2020)

  26 December 2020

  [Statement by a Trotskyist Platform in India in wake of the agitation against the new Farm laws]
  Radical Socialist
  December 20, 2020
  As winter cold descends hard on North India, the newly emerged ’trolly cities’ along the length of National Highway 1 and 9 at the Singhu and Tikri borders respectively, are getting longer day by day. Carrying with them rations for months, these protests have emerged as a formidable reaction against the neoliberal march of the Khaki Brigade and (…)

• Political Ideology of BJP: Pragya Singh Thakur | Ram Puniyani

  26 December 2020

  by Ram Puniyani
  Pragya Singh Thakur is no ordinary member of BJP, the ruling dispensation in the country. She is a MP from Bhopal and was also made the member of defense committee before she was removed from that committee for her statement hailing Nathuram Godse. She first came to lime light after the Malegaon blasts, in which six people were killed. Hemant Karkare, the police officer who was killed in 26/11 (2008) attack was investigating the case and he came across the fact that the (…)

• Is Access to Education Declining Fast for Weaker Section Students | Bharat Dogra

  26 December 2020, by Bharat Dogra

  by Bharat Dogra
  Developments in the education sector have generally been discussed in terms of slow or rapid progress. We have been used to saying—yes the access to education of this level has improved but it should have improved more. Now perhaps we are faced with the terrible prospect that access weaker sections to education may be actually declining, even at the elementary level.
  In Covid times there have been prolonged closures of schools, which is supposed to be made up by online (…)

• The man who used to get people acquitted in false cases has been implicated in one himself | Nilkantha Mandal, Sandeep Pandey and Kushagra Kumar

  26 December 2020

  All his life he fought valiantly to defend the rights of the people belonging to marginalized sections of society who were persecuted by the State or people who would stand up for their rights and consequently were targeted by the ruling elite but in the end he paid a price for his magnanimity. Surendra Gadling, now in jail in the Bhima-Koregoan violence case, is a human rights lawyer and Dalit rights activist based in Nagpur. He is known for taking up cases of extra-judicial killings, (…)

• Kakori Conspiracy Case: 93rd Anniversary of the Death Sentencing of Members of Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) | Shamsul Islam

  26 December 2020, by Shamsul Islam

  On August 9, 1925 a group of Indian revolutionaries affiliated to the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) which included Chandershekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil, Rajender Lahiri, Roshan Singh, Manmathnath Gupt and others waylaid the British Government treasury loaded on a passenger train at Kakori railway station (approximately 20 kilo meters from Lucknow) and captured the same. The then British rulers and their henchmen branded these revolutionaries as terrorists who (…)

• India’s military diplomacy is delusional | M K Bhadrakumar

  26 December 2020, by M K Bhadrakumar

  December 21, 2020
  The recent visits by the army chief General MM Naravane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia generated some excitement among Indian analysts that a brave new world of ‘military diplomacy’ has dawned. Bombastic coinages such as ‘military diplomacy’ are largely our inheritances from the Americans but when they are bandied about, conceptual clarity is lacking.
  Let us not mix up military diplomacy with gunboat diplomacy and coercive diplomacy. In a classic (…)