Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• West Bengal Outcome: The Hard Truth - It’s Pointless to Blame Mamata

  1 June 2019

  by Samyak Ghosh
  Prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi wants you to believe that the biggest story in the general election of 2019 is ‘inclusiveness’. While following the election result trends from the Press Club of India in New Delhi, I heard several commentators mourn the surge of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s vote-share as a mandate for religious polarisation of the worst kind. And, in the streets of New Delhi, people told me that the big story is ‘Modi’.
  All of these are true to a (…)

• An Elegy for Democracy

  1 June 2019

  23.05.2019 will be remembered as a black day. It was the day democracy in India was gagged to death. In line with a new bhakti A demagogue became god and dictatorship was reinstated.
  In a country that boasted of unity in diversity Hate came to be normalised Murder came to be justified Bigots became rulers once again.
  Jobs became endangered species. Education became a luxury. Economy crashed. Media and institutions became puppets.
  It was not a festival of democracy It was a pogrom (…)

• The Congress at a Critical Juncture

  1 June 2019, by Barun Das Gupta

  The humiliating defeat the Congress suffered in the latest Lok Sabha elections has faced it with an existential crisis. The truth is that as a parliamentary party trying to come to power through elections, it stands nowhere before the combined might of the BJP, RSS and other organisations of the Sangh Parivar. The challenge is not just political. It is also ideological. During the past five years, the Sangh Parivar has been successful in polarising Hindu votes on communal lines.
  As the (…)

• Indian elections: It wasn’t the economy, stupid!

  1 June 2019

  by L.K. Sharma
  Narendra Modi’s stunning victory in the parliamentary elections speaks volumes about the transformed India and an India keen to be transformed further. He defied the incumbency handicap to be crowned as India’s Prime Minister for a second term. He got the most impressive mandate despite his government’s dismal economic record, his unkept promises, mendacity, an unprecedented rise in bigotry and sustained low-level communal violence during the past five years.
  Elections are (…)

• The new “New India”: How New it will Be

  1 June 2019, by Badri Raina

  Many literate and not so literate men and women of my generation grew up with stipulations about a “New India” that derived from the ideals of the freedom movement.
  As is well-known, those ideals came then to be codified in the provisions of the Indian Constitution.
  In a broad brush of recapitulation, these provisions comprised the guarantee of a citizenship that would transcend religious, cultural and gender identities; the right of franchise to every adult Indian; equality before law (…)

• Why Kerala balked the Modi Wave

  1 June 2019, by M K Bhadrakumar

  Through the looking glass of a staunchly ‘secular-minded’ Malayali—a dirty word in the current idiom when triumphalist cultural nationalism is on the march—the Indian election results evoke mixed feelings.
  On the one hand, there is the wave of fear, anxiety, despair raging in the mind as one surveys the dismal national scene—mixed in no small measure with anger and sheer disgust at the unfairness of it all, as outlined brilliantly by S. Varadarajan in The Wire—and viewed from the heights (…)

• Mandate and After

  1 June 2019, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  In the wake of PM Narendra Modi’s tremendous success at the hustings by securing a second term in office, it is worthwhile reading the following lines written after Rajiv Gandhi’s massive electoral victory recorded in an India orphaned by Indira Gandhi’s tragic assassination in October 1984.
  Nineteen-Eightyfive has begun in this country with a New Look government formed after a phenomenal victory of the Congress under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi. With the (…)

• Necessary evils, too, are evil in game-changer election

  1 June 2019, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Everyone knows that this election is a game- changer. It is becoming clear that it is a convention-breaker as well. Things that were a no-no in electioneering are now accepted norms. Things to which T.N. Seshan said “out” are now “in”. The founding fathers of America said that, even at their best, governments were a necessary evil. Ditto with post-Seshan elections.
  That a judicial ruling should contribute to this feeling is disturbing. Bangalore city civil court issued a (…)

• Gandhi or Godse

  1 June 2019, by Suhas Borker

  The moral compass has no tones of grey
  It is white or black
  It is light or darkness
  It is good or evil
  It is Gandhi or Godse.
  Suhas Borker
  [Suhas Borker is an independent documentary filmmaker and Convener, Working Group on Alternative Strategies and is based in New Delhi. He can be e-mailed at suhasborker[at]gmail.com]

• Let not Truths remain Tongueless

  1 June 2019, by Badri Raina

  Athens feared the cloutless Socrates, Because he said what he had to say; He drank the hemlock cheerfully, And Athens is known by him today.
  Wycliff wrote the word of god In the English tongue; Burnt at the stake, he is now The English immortals among.
  Copernicus found god’s own earth Moving round the sun; The truth of his discovery Pushed back religion.
  Darwin disastrously dislodged The postulates of Creation; Reviled, he remains our beacon light To undefeated education.
  Why may we (…)