Mainstream Weekly

Lessons from Meerut

V R Krishna Iyer — 2015-10-19T19:52:45Z

V.R. Krishna Iyer, former Judge of the Supreme Court of India and Home Minister in the CPI-led government in Kerala (1957-59), visited in 1982 Meerut where communal tension had been persisting for over two months. On his return, Justice Krishna Iyer wrote a letter to P.C. Sethi, the Home Minister, Government of India, giving his impressions and suggestions. He forwarded a copy of this letter to the Prime Minister of India, with the observation: “After all, the integrity of the nation, the (…)

- 2015

Indian Constitution — Some Creative Mutations Mooted / "Conflagration Nandigram": Letter to West Bengal Governor

V R Krishna Iyer — 2014-12-15T12:42:01Z

We offer our sincere homage to his abiding memory by reproducing two of his pieces that appeared in Mainstream—an article and an open letter—in 2007. We are also carrying two tributes from persons who knew him well.
Indian Constitution—Some Creative Mutations Mooted
V.K. KRISHNA IYER
More than a semi-centennial span has passed and several amendments inscribed making our long and complicated Constitution an arcane, logomachic and even obscurantist instrument. This supreme deed is now a (…)

- 2014

Salutations to a Dear Comrade

V R Krishna Iyer — 2014-11-02T10:03:21Z

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! Dear Nikhil is dead. Is he? It is blaspheme to say he is dead. He dwells in the hearts of millions within Bharat and all over the globe. ‘Death, be not proud...for those whom thou think'st thou does overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet can'st thou kill them.'

- 2014

Judicial Corruption in Profusion Must be Wiped Out without Mercy

V R Krishna Iyer — 2010-12-31T04:29:04Z

The judiciary enjoys vast powers as they are final and infallible, so powerful that when an executive violates the law the judges can quash their action and issue directions in exercise of the writ power. When Parliament makes law and transgresses the Constitution or issues orders beyond the bounds of fundamental rights, the court can demolish that order and action but when the higher courts are guilty of unrestrained violation there is no instrument to correct them nor is there a code to (…)

- 2010

Tryst with Destiny — Its Kismet on August 15, 2010

V R Krishna Iyer — 2010-09-02T15:56:55Z

Max Muller said of India, the following eologatary felicitations:
If we were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow—in some parts a very paradise on earth—I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well (…)

- 2010

Jettison Jammu And Kashmir From India-Pakistan Imbroglio

V R Krishna Iyer — 2010-08-22T17:59:32Z

Well over three score and three years we two neighourly Republics have become indigent independent countries. India, that is, Bharat, a united Republic, would be a culturally powerful and resourceful nation. But while giving Freedom from the imperial Crown, a treacherous stratagem was practised. India was divided into Bharat and Pakistan ever to be on belligerent terms with communal hatred. And as disastrous history would have it, J&K, a Muslim majority State, has its resources wasted on (…)

- 2010

Some Lessons from the Bhopal Outcome

V R Krishna Iyer — 2010-06-20T12:25:36Z

The court verdict shows that India is still in a Victorian imperial-feudal era, distances away from the socialist dream
The mass slaughter that occurred in Bhopal on December 2, 1984 was the consequence of an American multinational corporation dealing with Indian lives in a cavalier manner. Some 20,000 people were “gasassinated”. Yet, after 26 years of trial, the culprits get two years of rigorous imprisonment as punishment. Such a thing can happen only in bedlam Bharat.
The (…)

- 2010

Supreme Court of India or Supreme Court for Indians

V R Krishna Iyer — 2010-02-22T15:21:25Z

These two versions are radically different in principle and content. The Preamble of our current Constitution has inscribed its conscience that it pledges the people of India to Justice—Social, Economic, Cultural and Political India with a geo-political concept. Indians are humanist—a socio-economic idea, a collective value, emphatically, a crore or more of Indian humanity with a cultural legacy. A finer noble thought than a mere span of space, a terrain or land politically united by a (…)

- 2010

India's First Woman Ambassador

V R Krishna Iyer — 2009-11-07T17:58:56Z

TRIBUTE
C.B. Muthamma, India's first woman ambassador, passed away on October 15 at the age of 85.
Frailty, thy name is woman, they say. That is not a true statement at all. So long as social justice is an integral part of our constitutional fundamentals and judges remain sensitive and not pachydermic, gender justice will remain a non-negotiable article of faith. Professional gender bias and discrimination have no place in the civilised scheme of things: those were traits of (…)

- November 2009

Judge Sonia Sotomayor

V R Krishna Iyer — 2009-09-21T09:20:53Z

Great Judge Sotomayor, I salute you. Why? You are a super symbol of gender power, a fine paradigm of feminine title to judicial authority to dispense justice at the national level, a glory not only for the womanhood of the USA but a symbol of the woman's super-stature in the sex performance in all humanity. You are the robed sex on the Supreme Court Bench, an inspiration for women in all countries now neglected because the masculine gender occupies an unjust majority in all the three great (…)

- September 2009