Mainstream Weekly

Nehru and Indian Socialism

Arjun Sengupta — 2010-11-16T06:26:58Z

Jawaharlal Nehru was not the only aristocrat who entered politics and joined the struggle for independence in India. There were also others who came from similar background of secure family roots, extravagance and style, and who courted imprisonment, flirted with hardship and enjoyed the luxury of sacrifice.
If Nehru was a romantic, a politician who was more a poet than a schemer, a revolutionary who loved to philosophise more than to operate, he was not the only one of that kind in (…)

- 2010

Economic Ideology of the Congress: Empowering the Poor

Arjun Sengupta — 2010-10-06T15:16:59Z

[(TRIBUTE
Dr Arjun Sengupta, 73, whom C. Rangarajan, the Chairman of the PM's Economic Advisory Council, described as a “career bureaucrat” having a “good understanding of social problems” and “deeply touched and involved in finding solutions for people at the bottom of the population pile”, passed away at New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences on September 26 evening after stoically fighting cancer for quite sometime. What was most remarkable was that he never spoke about the (…)

- 2010

Economic Ideology of the Congress: Empowering the Poor

Arjun Sengupta — 2009-05-02T21:23:00Z

It was Gandhiji who first gave the economic ideology of the Congress a concrete formulation, to bring “Swaraj for the hungry and the starving millions”. “Swaraj” is nothing but “empowerment” for the poor to gain control over their own life and destiny. For Nehru, the objective was the same, clearly formulated on the midnight of Indian independence, as “the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity to bring freedom and opportunity to the common man”.
That (…)

- May 2009

Congress, Left Must Get Together Again

Arjun Sengupta — 2009-04-26T11:45:33Z

It is high time the Congress and the Left got back together in national politics, which has degenerated into a fissiparous mess. All kinds of obscurantist, communal, and casteist forces have risen to the surface, pushing to the background the debates on real national issues. Only the rejuvenation of the Congress-Left alliance can alter these trends.
Both the Congress and the Left must realise that they are natural allies in spite of the differences in their ideology and numerical (…)

- April 2009