Mainstream Weekly

Remembering Tapan Bose | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2025-02-22T16:11:17Z

The death of Tapan Bose (1946-2025), documentary filmmaker and a leading campaigner for human rights and peace in South Asia, in Delhi on January 30 after a period of illness has been widely mourned by the human rights community in South Asia and beyond. He was more popularly and affectionately known as Tapan Da. My friendship with Tapan Da started over 30 years ago when a friend from London called to say he was coming with an Indian friend, Tapan Bose, to meet me in Oxford. I had already (…)

- 2025

Contesting the narrative of the US elections as a ringing endorsement of Trump | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2024-11-16T05:49:18Z

The narrative presented by the mainstream media almost all over the world of Donald Trump

- 2024

Sitaram Yechury and non-sectarian leftwing politics | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2024-10-05T02:27:35Z

One image and an idea that prominently comes to mind when considering paying tribute to Sitaram Yechury are non-sectarian ways of conducting politics. Politics in India, especially in the last few years, has become so polarised that the idea of non-sectarian politics appears odd; precisely because of that, it is alluring as an imagination. His premature death when Indian politics and society needed more than ever to respect divergent views, traditions, and cultures is not only a loss to (…)

- 2024

BJP's electoral strategy: its inner contradictions could lead to its failure in 2024 | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2024-06-01T02:30:21Z

As the seventh phase of India's 2024 General Election gets underway, the emerging political scene in the country is throwing signals of inner contradictions in the Modi-led BJP's strategy that had proved electorally successful in 2014 and 2019. The key aspect of this contradiction is that what led this strategy to succeed in the past is precisely what may lead to its failure in 2024.
It is likely to appear counterintuitive to say that a success can be the cause of failure. The view that (…)

- 2024

Ahmad Salim - a Punjabi poet who became a pul (bridge) between three Punjabs | Pritam Singh with Nuzhat Abbas

Pritam Singh — 2024-03-15T12:51:00Z

[fond noir][blanc]TRIBUTEblanc]fond noir]
The life story of Ahmad Salim, who died in December last year, is of a boy born in a West Punjabi village in 1945 who rose to be an eminent poet, writer, researcher, scholar-activist, translator, archivist and above all, a socialist of exceptional qualities who waged a life long fight for truth, justice, peace, and rights of workers, peasants, religious and linguistic minorities (especially of women in these identities) not only in Pakistan but in (…)

- 2024

There is no perfect solution to Israel Palestine conflict but less than a perfect one is feasible and desirable | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2023-11-04T14:43:59Z

Israel Palestine conflict is perhaps the most intractable conflict in the world from the time Israel as a state was created in 1948 and projected as the homeland of the Jewish people from all over the world. The creation of this state was accompanied by the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians, the original inhabitants of the place. This double act of possession and dispossession performed at the same time created the material and cultural conditions for an enduring conflict. The (…)

- 2023

The Khalistan Question: An Interview with Pritam Singh (2020)

Pritam Singh — 2023-10-07T00:38:14Z

Feb 9, 2020
Joe Hayns
An interview with Pritam Singh on the demand for Khalistan
This year, Punjabis will hold a referendum (known as “Referendum 2020”) over whether Indian Punjab should become an independent state called Khalistan. The non-binding referendum aims to gauge the interest of Punjabis in establishing Khalistan before making a formal case at the UN for a binding referendum. In this context, Joe Hayns interviews Pritam Singh, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Oxford (…)

- 2023

Big Questions over India's ‘Green Hydrogen' project | Pritam Singh and Simon Pirani

Pritam Singh, Simon PIrani — 2023-04-01T02:42:51Z

There's so much fanfare around green hydrogen in the ruling establishment and among clean energy hawks, but what is being missed is the problems associated with hydrogen being treated as an alternative to fossil fuels and the viability of the process involved in obtaining green hydrogen.
Given the climate emergency our planet is facing, with accelerating global heating and devastating bio-diversity loss, any initiative by a government which proclaims its aim as ‘greening the economy' (…)

- 2023

India's Agribusiness Firms Consolidate Power | Pritam Singh

Pritam Singh — 2022-04-15T18:50:40Z

Agribusiness corporations have been on the rise in India since the 1970s. Unless there is a change in government policy, smaller farms face a bleak future.
April 5, 2022
A qualitative change took place in Indian agriculture in the 1970s: the government then had announced that the country had achieved domestic food self-sufficiency, and also that India had a surplus of food for export.
Fifty years on, this idea of achieving a food surplus remains elusive for India, especially since the (…)

- 2022