A Tribute
Generations spanning over centuries have been told that the French Revolution devoured its own children. In a sense, this could be said also of the Russian Revolution in which many of its heroes had...
View ArticleThe Nehru Legacy: A Self-critical Communist Evaluation
There is the danger of paying fulsome tributes to Nehru and then drifiting with the current so far as Congressmen are concerned. And as for the Left, of being coldly formally correct and then sit aside...
View ArticleMarxism and Aggression
Mainstream has put to me the question: How is it that a Socialist country can commit aggression?The question is quite natural and legitimate. It arises from the fact of history itself. Way back in 1959...
View ArticlePolitics of Succession
Barring us, Socialists, all Opposition politics in the country today have degenerated into succession politics.Opposition parties seem to have decided that the task of changing the attitudes of the...
View ArticleSecularism: Corner-stone of Our Political Faith
Indian polity is an admixture of variegated ethos and divergent cultures. Many are the common ideals and objectives which we share. Amidst this apparent sea of diversity there is a common bond which...
View ArticleBattle against Separatism
I have heard it said that it is a sad commentary on our national character that after 15 years of our independent and free existence we should still be discussing the question of national integration....
View ArticleQuestions of Freedom and People's Emancipation — V (b)
Kobad Ghandy from Tihar Jail is writing on the concept of freedom vis-s-vis present-day society as also in relation to a future just order, bringing out some causes for the failure of the erstwhile...
View ArticleEvolution of Political Corruption
In just about a year's time, we shall be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the country's independence when power was transferred from the unwilling hands of the British rulers to the leaders of...
View ArticleCombining Land Reforms and Watershed Development
Many landless (or almost landless) persons who got land under various land-distribution programmes in India could not actually occupy and cultivate their land due to the resistance of powerful big...
View ArticlePedal Power as the 21st Century Charkha
Building on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)by V.S. Ramamurthy and Saurabh KumarThe MGNREGS is a radical measure, based on the concept of entitlement of the most...
View ArticleOn the Margins of Survival
In the context of the globalising economy, the hegemonic neo-liberal global policies have regained relevance. Based on large-scale indus-trialisation and privatisation, a higher economic growth focuses...
View ArticleCritical History of Our Times
BOOK REVIEWThe Underside of Things: India and the World: A Citizen's Miscellany, 2006-2011 by Badri Raina; Three Essays Collective; 2012; Pages: xxii+758; Paperback Rs 850.Badri Raina is like an...
View ArticleDeath Penalty and Mohammad Afzal Guroo
There were fireworks and dancing in the streets when Ajmal Kasab was hanged. It is unlikely that the damage done in Mumbai in November 2008 was undone by this noise and boisterousness, and there is no...
View ArticleObama's Tough Term: Political and Economic Risks Stare at the US
by A CommentatorBushmaster guns have made it to the headlines after the recent heartbreaking shooting in a school in the United States. While the debate on gun ownership following the massacre was...
View ArticleMainstream: An Enlightening Half-Century
Fifty years is a long period for any forum to survive and move from strength to strength. Mainstream can look with great pride to its role in the five decades of its existence, particularly because it...
View ArticleIlluminating the Path to Nation-building: The Legacy of Mainstream and Nikhilda
by O.P. SabherwalThe rise of Mainstream synchronised with a period of building Indian nationhood, when both the economy and its political propulsion treaded an unchartered path posing baffling...
View ArticleFifty Years of Fearless Journalism
Mainstream appeared at a critical moment of independent India's history. Its first issue was dated September 1, 1962. The eighth issue (dated October 20) hit the newsstands a day before, on the 19th....
View ArticleOn Mainstream's Golden Jubilee
It is an occasion both of rejoicing and introspection for a person like me who has been associated without interruption with the Mainstream since its birth and during all the years of ups and downs. In...
View ArticleFifty Years Young!
I remember reading in a high-brow British magazine some years ago that a golden rule of literary criticism is that when you review a book you should forget its author and when you write about the...
View ArticleDon't Forget the Golden Age
In his acclaimed survey of history, Eric Hobsbawn marked the third quarter of the 20th century as a golden age in the West. His argu-ment was that industrial progress occurred in the postwar years...
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