Mainstream Weekly

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• September 13—Why Death Anniversary of Jatindra Nath Das Should be Observed as Justice for Political Prisoners Day | Bharat Dogra

  11 September 2020, by Bharat Dogra

  Jatindra Nath Das was a very courageous and determined freedom fighter who accepted the most painful sufferings with a smiling face for the ideal of freedom of India. He achieved martyrdom at the age of only 25 on September 13, 1929 in Lahore jail. He was a brilliant student but chose to dedicate his life to freedom movement. While doing his BA he was arrested and sent to Mymensing Jail. Here he as well as other arrested freedom fighter prisoners were treated very badly. Even at this very (…)

• Belarus: They are all in prison, or they have been thrown out of the country - A statement from Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate

  11 September 2020

  Another Unknown Person Ringing at My Door: A statement from Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate and Chair of Belarusian PEN
  September 9, 2020
  There is no one left of my friends and associates in the opposition’s Coordination Council. They are all in prison, or they have been thrown out of the country. The last, Maksim Znak, was taken today.
  First they seized our country, and now they are seizing the best of us. But hundreds of others will come and fill the places of those who have (…)

• I danced in the streets after Allende’s victory in Chile 50 years ago. Now I see its lessons for today | Ariel Dorfman

  11 September 2020

  by Ariel Dorfman
  September. 4, 2020
  Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world.
  President Allende’s victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left-wing coalition used (…)

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  Book Review: Rangarajan on Zhang, ’The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128’

  11 September 2020

  The Yellow River is a key factor in this environmental drama, and there is little doubt that as with the Indus, Brahmaputra, or Mekong, its pasts and futures hold mysteries humans can barely master. One wishes for more explicit comparisons with other societies and the Song dynasty’s time and ours. If modernity has longer, older roots, do we rethink the environmental bounds of our own age?

• The Moon and stars are a compass for nocturnal animals – but light pollution is leading them astray | Svenja Tidau, Daniela Torres Dia, Stuart Jenkins

  11 September 2020

  by Svenja Tidau, Daniela Torres Dia, Stuart Jenkins
  August 11, 2020
  Many nocturnal animal species use light from the moon and stars to migrate at night in search of food, shelter or mates. But in our recent study we uncovered how artificial light is disrupting these nightly migrations.
  Electric lighting is transforming our world. Around 80% of the global population now lives in places where night skies are polluted with artificial light. A third of humanity can no longer see the Milky (…)

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  Video: Fellow Prisoners by John Berger

  11 September 2020

  I picked up the phone and knew immediately it was an unexpected call from you, speaking from your flat in the Via Paolo Sarpi. (Two days after the election results and Berlusconi’s comeback.) The speed with which we identify a familiar voice coming out of the blue is comforting, but also somewhat mysterious. Because the measures, the units we use in calculating the clear distinction that exists between one voice and another, are unformulated and nameless. They don’t have a code. These days more and more is encoded.

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  [rouge]Table of Contents Mainstream - Lockdown Edition no.24 | Sept 5 [/rouge]

  4 September 2020

  Table of Contents - Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 38, New Delhi, September 5, 2020 Letter to the Readers - Mainstream September 5, 2020| The Editor India Beckons Congress | Ashok Celly A non-Gandhian President for the Congress Party: Need of the Hour | P. S. Jayaramu Delhi Diary | Ather Farruqui Privatizing the Pandemic | Arindam Roy Aggressive Privatization May Accentuate Exclusion Further | D. M. Diwakar Implications of National Education Policy 2020 on (…)

• [vert]Letter to the Readers - Mainstream’s Lockdown Edition No. 24 | Sept 5[/vert]

  4 September 2020

  India is in the throes of major economic crisis: According to official data released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) on August 31, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 23.9 per cent in the April-June quarter of 2020-21 from that in the same quarter last financial year. The Chief Economist of the World Bank has further confirmed this while releasing its own graph on G20 nations showing the Indian Economy’s performance at -25.6 in Quarter 2 of 2020 — the worst among all G20 (…)

• India Beckons Congress | Ashok Celly

  4 September 2020, by Ashok Celly

  Let me say this straight away that India badly needs the Congress party with all its faults. A Congress-mukt Bharat is not in our interest. For Congress is the only opposition party with an all-India presence even in its present, debilitated state. Congress is very much present in the north (M.P., Rajasthan, Punjab and Chattisgarh); in the south, it wields considerable influence in Karnataka and Kerala; its presence in the west Maharashtra and Gujarat – is something to be reckoned with (…)

• A non Gandhian President for the Congress Party: Need of the Hour | P. S. Jayaramu

  4 September 2020

  by P. S. Jayaramu
  The debate over the need for change in the Presidentship of the Congress Party has been going on for over an year following Rahul Gandhi’s resignation as Party President in July 2019. Since then he has consistently turned down pleas for his return as Party President, something which was endorsed by his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra a few weeks ago. The most recent of such being Sonia Gandhi’s willingness to resign as interim President at the recent virtual CWC meeting. (…)