The C. Achutha Menon Government: An Effective Template Against Fascism?
October 2015 marks the 45th anniversary of the first Congress-Communist Minstry headed by C. Achutha Menon. In the wake of the communal onslaught on all walks of life, a critical re-assessement of the...
View ArticleWhen Damn Lies, Damn Truths are both Damn Right—the Games we can Play with...
IMPRESSIONSAs everyone knows, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Mark Twain did not specifically mention census because census is statistics. Ten people interpret census figures in ten different...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Revives Collegiums System — a Fresh Debate Begins
The much-awaited judgment of the Supreme Court has held on October 19 that the Constitution (Ninetyninth Amendment) Act, 2014 and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014, are...
View ArticleBihar: Patronising Class Interest behind the Facade of Caste Consolidation
by Arun SrivastavaAs Bihar heads for what is being described as a mini-Lok Sabha election, the politics of pretention has been replaced by pragmatism and the leaders of both the conglomerates, the NDA...
View ArticleBJP's Politics of Social Engineering in Bihar
Kanshiram, the late Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo, had brought bahujan as a viable political constituency to forge a political alliance between the Dalits, Other Backward Castes and Religious...
View ArticleThird Front and Left Front stand exposed in Bihar
COMMUNICATIONThe ones who are opposed to the National Democratic Alliance Government at the Centre, headed by the Pradhan Parcharak of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, wrongly and euphe-mistically...
View ArticleDebate on Beef
India has been pushed into an unnecessary debate whether beef should be banned or not. This is a wrong question to ask in a country where the emotions of Hindus are linked with the cow, which they...
View ArticleWill India Survive?: Reasons to believe she may
In the past week or so, one writer after another, who has been a recipient of a state award, has been returning that award to the state in protest against the targeted mafia-style killing of a renowned...
View ArticleThe Engulfing Darkness
POLITICAL NOTEBOOKAs the season of festivals and lights comes, darkness has engulfed the literary and cultural spheres of the country. Growing religious intolerance and intolerance of thoughts and...
View ArticleAfter Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi's 31st death anniversary falls on October 31 this year. On this occasion we are reproducing the following ‘Editor's Notebook' that N.C. wrote after her death.Twenty years after her great...
View ArticleBhupesh: Some Reminiscences
From N.C.'s WritingsCPI leader Bhupesh Gupta's 101st birth anniversary fell on October 20 this year. While remembering him we reproduce the following piece that N.C. wrote after his death in Moscow on...
View ArticleFrom the High Noon of Indian Journalism
In the current wave of litterateurs and poets returning their well-deserved national honours to protest the hate-murders of three fellow writers, one was struck by the fact that there was just one...
View ArticleNikhil Chakravartty and Some of his Times
The Communist Party of India (CPI) was born in the aftermath of the ferment generated by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 on the one hand and the non-co-operation movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the...
View ArticleBihar Poll: Mother of all Elections
by Sanjay MishraDubbed as “the mother of all elections”, the five-phase election for the 243 seats of the Bihar Assembly has justifiably evoked a lot of media attention and buzz among political...
View ArticleRSS forces a Tactical Shift in the BJP's Style of Election Campaigning in Bihar
by Arun SrivastavaIn a sudden tactical shift the BJP, instead of attacking Nitish and his claim of developing Bihar, has been seeking a clarification from him whether he would be able to keep his...
View ArticleIndia-EU FTA: Time for a F undamental Rethink?
by Kavaljit SinghIndia and the EU would soon resume negotiations on the stalled India-EU free trade agreement. In a joint statement issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela...
View ArticleRising Intolerance
When distinguished writers and artists return to the Akademis the awards which had been conferred on them, the question to ask is not why they did not do it earlier, say, at the worst times like the...
View ArticleThree Murders and a Lynching
by Ram PuniyaniLaws of nature cannot be applied to human society so directly. Still sometimes these have been used to explain/justify social catastrophes, ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes' (in...
View ArticleDangerous Rise of the Rightwing Forces
POLITICAL NOTEBOOKThe political landscape of the country is changing at a fast and furious pace. ‘Intolerance', ‘illiberal', ‘communal bigotry', ‘fringe elements'—all these have become hackneyed words...
View ArticleReport from Moscow
The author, then Mainstream's Special Correspondent and now Editor, was in Moscow from November 6 to 23, 1991 to get an idea of the objective situation in the Soviet Union just before its...
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