Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• The Weaponisation of Supply Chains: Lessons for India | Anusreeta Dutta

  15 August

  The first principle of the global economy was simple: economic interdependence would reduce violence. As countries became more integrated through trade, manufacturing and technology, supply chains were meant to provide stability, not competition. That assumption is increasingly falling apart at the seams. Today, supply chains are weapons of geopolitical competition, and strategic considerations, not market efficiency, determine access to critical technology, critical minerals, energy (…)

• When Jyoti Basu Addressed an RSS-Backed Forum: Revisiting a Forgotten Encounter | Sufal Bepari

  15 August

  Headlines of the two-part report on Jyoti Basu’s lecture published in Swastika on 25 July and 1 August 1977.
  With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, Hindu nationalists’ long-cherished dream of winning over Bengal has finally materialised. Significant in many ways, this political development will undoubtedly invite rigorous scrutiny and, in attempting to make sense of it, looking back at the past remains indispensable. As Jawaharlal Nehru (…)

• Film Review: Sutlej —scattered notes | Chaman Lal

  15 August, by Chaman Lal

  Satluj is a 2026 film in Punjabi directed by Honey Trehan and starring Diljit Dosanjh
  It is a story based on events in in Punjab in 1995; that was its first title also! Strangely, I was living close to the events while teaching in Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and staying with my journalist friend, the late Harbir Singh Bhanwar. Every evening on return from the University, we would talk days events. The GNDU library has on its staff literary friend, the late Punjabi poet Sheharyaar, (…)

• Tamils seek Europe’s Help as War Crime Haunts Sri Lanka | M.R. Narayan Swamy

  15 August, by M R Narayan Swamy

  In a country where thousands of Tamils were killed in the war against the Tamil Tigers, the horrific rape and murder of a school student way back in 1986 is still haunting Sri Lanka. Now, it threatens to pit liberal Europe against Colombo. Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was sexually assaulted and done to death by soldiers in Jaffna at a time when Sri Lanka was waging what looked like an unwinnable war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
  When her mother and brother, worried where (…)

• Diagnoses of the Dance | Emanuel Eisenberg (1934)

  15 August

  From New Theatre, Vol. 1 No. 8. July-August, 1934
  In reviewing the Workers’ Dance League’s 1934 competition, Emanuel Eisenberg sees, with exceptions, the new revolutionary dance too much about, and not enough of, what it seeks to represent in the art form. REVOLUTIONARY art is obviously not art which either announces, or depicts soberly in advance, the revolution; the completely automatic recording machine can do that just as well, and bourgeois artists are as slick at the game as any, if (…)

• International Declaration on Gender Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences 15 August 2026

  15 August

  We, the undersigned international legal and human rights experts, drawn together from many regions of the world by our shared commitment to the human rights of women and girls, issue the following International Declaration on Gender Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences, Recalling that, in accordance with the United Nations (UN) Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and (…)

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  Unity Statement of RCPI and Radical Socialist, adopted after discussion on 9 and 10 August 2026

  15 August

  Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) was formed during the India freedom struggle from a split in the then Stalinist and class collaborationist CPI in 1934 initially as Communist League and subsequently changed into RCPI when it became a party. The central leader of the RCPI was Saumyendranath Tagore, an Indian delegate to the 6th Congress of the Communist International, who was to gradually question the Colonial Thesis, the decision to expel Trotsky and the sectarian line during (…)

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  CPI Condoles the Demise of MP Parameswaran | Aug 12, 2026

  15 August

  Communist Party of India
  August 12, 2026
  Press Release
  The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India issued the following statement today (August 12, 2026):
  The Communist Party of India expresses its deep sorrow at the demise of Comrade M. P. Parameswaran, renowned nuclear scientist, Marxist thinker and one of the foremost proponents of the people’s science movement in India. He passed away at the age of 92, leaving behind a rich legacy of scientific work, social (…)

• PM Bhargava the scientist with a spine — Excerpts from his biography

  15 August

  The Man and The Making of Modern Biology in India by Chandana Chakrabarti SouthSide Books . . . a set of episodes that cut across institutions and disciplines . . . when Prof PM Bhargava (PMB) chose to intervene rather than stay silent.
  Indo-US Vaccine Action Programme
  PMB did not suffer from the usual afflictions that scientists often acquire along the way: the ivory-tower syndrome, cultivated social detachment, policy indifference, fear of taking positions, or a belief that engagement (…)

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  Learning from the past of India’s forests | Dinesh C Sharma

  15 August

  BOOK REVIEW India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History Arupjyoti Saikia & Mahesh Rangarajan (Editors) Vintage 343 pages Price 999 Forests have been at the centre of human life since ancient times. They are part of history, archaeology, myths, culture, livelihoods, politics, commerce, and much more. Forests are closely inter-linked with all activities in the modern era – food, fuel, water, energy, development, transportation, human health, recreation and so on. Their extent, quality (…)