Mainstream Weekly

Sri Lanka: Does Rajapakse smell an Opportunity?

Mohan K. Tikku — 2016-04-10T18:19:02Z

‘Yahapalana' is a term that has been much in use in Sri Lanka's political discourse ever since the present government came to power early last year. ‘Yahapalana' is a Sinhala word, and means ‘good governance'. The Sirisena Government was voted into office in the January 2015 election on a promise of ‘good governance'. But one year down the road, the term has acquired other shades of meaning that are not always complimentary, and sometimes sarcastic.
Like recently, when Sri Lanka had an (…)

- 2016

The Lone Wolf Phenomenon

Mohan K. Tikku — 2016-01-30T22:00:09Z

A couple of years ago, the annual State of the Future report of the Millennium Project in Washington had sounded an early warning on the Lone Wolf phenomenon that has gone largely unheeded across the world. Now that the animal is getting closer to the door, it may be time to be warned on how to deal with it. In the annals of international terror, the Lone Wolf pheno-menon is about the terrorist who acts indivi-dually without evincing affiliations to any terrorist group or network. And yet, (…)

- 2016

Old-time NATO the New Dinosaur?

Mohan K. Tikku — 2015-12-06T18:54:39Z

Still recovering from the after-effects of the November 13 terrorist attack in Paris, President Francois Hollande followed his trip to Washington with a visit to Moscow on November 26. The United States, after all, was the traditional ‘Big Daddy' of the Western alliance. But Russia had to be the new ally. The French President was there to seek Russia's support in the collective war against the terrorist Islamic State, and President Vladimir Putin was promising it in ample measure.
Does (…)

- 2015

Netaji and Mystery of the Secret Files

Mohan K. Tikku — 2015-10-03T20:22:24Z

Now that Mamata Banerjee has served the appetiser, everybody is hungering after the big meal. The 64 Netaji files running into 12,744 pages that the West Bengal Chief Minister declassified on September 18 seem to indicate that Netaji had survived the air crash. The rest is mostly marginal details, besides a few missing phrases or sentences in the papers that only deepen the mystery without revealing much. The real story though, one assumes, rests in the files in possession of the Central (…)

- 2015

Sri Lanka: Managing Constitutional Change

Mohan K. Tikku — 2015-05-16T06:24:24Z

On April 28, Sri Lanka commenced a process of constituional change that has passed unnoticed by large sections of the media in this country. The significance of the enactment of the 19th Constitution Amendment by the Sri Lankan Parliament on that day lay in that it undid some of the measures taken by former President Mahinda Rajapakse in recent years to make Sri Lanka a more authoritarian state than it already was. Further, the new amendment marked the beginning of a process that, when (…)

- 2015

Nigeria: Justice for the Nightly Raiders

Mohan K. Tikku — 2014-05-19T19:05:14Z

“If Boko Haram succeeds in its stated agenda to make the country ungovernable, if Boko Haram succeeds in goading those areas that have victim citizens in the northern part of the country into reprisal actions on the nearest targets, not only will this cause a break-up, it will be very messy. That is the reason some of us have been issuing appeals to community leaders to make sure it doesn't happen in their communities.” —Wole Soyinka
Despite such wise counsel coming from one of the most (…)

- 2014

Talking to the Taliban

Mohan K. Tikku — 2013-07-16T00:54:52Z

The proposed talks with the Taliban on the future dispensation in Afghanistan appeared to be teetering close to the brink on June 22 when Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai announced in Kabul that his government will not be available for participation in the talks in Doha any more. What was galling for the Afghan President was that Washington, in its apparent keenness to reach a quick-fix deal with the Taliban, was marginalising Kabul's role even before the talks had actually begun. The (…)

- 2013

Writer in the Time of Terror: The ‘Other' as a Metaphor

Mohan K. Tikku — 2009-09-12T15:11:09Z

“What happens from here on is no longer a question of ideological oppositions, but a struggle for global reality. There are two global realities, resembling in a nonrepresentational way the old programmatic realities of East and West: the imaginary electronic globe, and the poetic-specific-eco-community.
“The poet's job is to short-circuit the imaginary globe.”
—Romanian writer Andrei Codrescu in
The Disappearance of the Outside: a Manifesto for Escape
Like the East (…)

- September 2009