2010

by Vaddi Sudhakar
The Korean peninsula is once again sending an alarm signal to the international community that the region is highly sensitive. The firing of shells between the two Korean nations is a second major incident after the sinking of South Korea’s corvette Cheonan in March 2010. The series of incidents in the peninsula region have led the actors to push towards the brink of waging war in the North-East Asian region, primarily the Republic of Korea (South) and Democratic People’s (…)

Introduction
Is it possible to make money while helping the poor fighting against poverty? In the last ten years or so, at least one business, micro-financing, appears to answer in the affirmative. Micro-finance has been a catchword for a few years now, a panacea for poverty eradication that the poor have all been looking for. It would carry away the poor out of poverty as if by swaying the magic wand of microfinance. The birth of the movement roughly coincided with the rise of the (…)

While the 2G spectrum scam takes a new turn with the CBI carrying out nationwide raids on several premises including those of disgraced erstwhile Telecom Minister A. Raja and his close associates among officials and businessmen more than a year after it filed an FIR in that regard, terror has revisited Varanasi with the December 7 blast leaving a one-year-old girl dead and 35 injured (among whom are four foreigners), and the outlawed terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM) claiming (…)

As the arrested founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange in a signed article in The Australian, titled “Don’t shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths”, on December 8 called for the “need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth”, there appears to be a fierce competition between two major figures in the “Free World”—US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Republican Sarah Palin (who contested the last 2008 US poll for the post of Vice-President)—in attacking Assange (…)

by Suvrat Raju
Although the mainstream media collectively swooned on President Barack Obama—when he visited India in early November—and breath-lessly informed its audience about how many rooms he had booked at various five-star hotels, there was little discussion on two key questions. What is Obama’s foreign policy record? Is it consistent with his portrayal as a progressive world leader? Moreover, what impact will his visit have on most Indians?
Obama’s Foreign Policy
SUPPORTERS of (…)

ON RAMASWAMI VENKATARAMAN’S BIRTH CENTENARY
The birth centenary of our former President, Ramaswami Venkataraman (1910-2009), fell last week on December 4. Remembering him on this occasion we are reproducing here a speech he delivered more than 25 years ago—at the inaugural function of the Society for Law and Justice, New Delhi on March 15, 1985. We also reproduce, with due acknowledgement, an appropriate tribute by the country’s leading strategic expert that appered in The Indian Express (…)

President R. Venkataraman, whose 100th birthday falls today, called himself a copy-book President, and compared the role of the Indian presidency to that of an “emergency light” which comes into play only when needed. His style of functioning as a copy-book President was in sharp contrast with that of his predecessor, during whose last two years in office Delhi was rife with rumours of his attempts to dismiss an elected Prime Minister with a massive majority in the Lok Sabha.
Though (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
We as a nation have taken pride in the fact that in political life, a liberal and tolerant approach has become the hall-mark of Indian democracy. While differences have always cropped up in our national movement involving the giants among its leadership, there was by and large adherence to the principle of live and let live.
In our young days, we in Bengal looked upto Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das as our leader, and yet when he and Motilal Nehru differed from Gandhiji (…)

Preamble
“Indian historians have forgotten the history of ideas.” The claim appeared as the headline of a recent newspaper article.1 Add it to your worry-list if you will, but do not forget as you do that similar claims can be made, with as much force, about many of the country’s civil and political societies. The frequent rows that erupt over “seditious speech” make that obvious.
Seditious Speech in India
LOTS of people make such speeches, without any- one saying anything. But (…)

by Arup Dasgupta
India’s emergence as the fourth largest economy with its burgeoning growth story conceals the grim world of poverty and deprivation of her teeming millions across the vast countrywide. The largest democracy of the world has spawned a kind of political culture of arrogance and muscle-flexing that every political party has adopted as its working principle. When there is disaffection among the poor resulting in the decline of law and order, the state intervenes with (…)