December 02, 2006

The national scenario has definitely turned grim over the last few days. The Justice Rajindar Sachar Committee, set up to evaluate the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in the country, has come out with its report—it was submitted to the PM some days ago and tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2006. It brings out the stark reality of Indian Muslims—who are more in number than those inhabiting either Pakistan or Bangladesh and population-wise next only to the Muslims in (…)

With the nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula following the detonation of a nuclear device by Pyongyang the situation in the region has undergone a sea-change. Lately the North Korean Government’s statement against carrying out further tests and on Pyongyang’s readiness to return to the six-party talks for stabilising and normalising the situation in the Korean peninsula does hold some promise and even the Government of India has expressed its appreciation for the statement. Yet the world (…)

So there are death sentences and death sentences. When terrorist Mohammed Afzal was ordered to be hanged, communal emotions led to a clash of fundamentalisms. When college girl Priyadarshini’s killer was given the same order, human emotions led to a collective sigh of approval. And why not? A qualified lawyer with a wife and daughter brutally assaulting his college-mate, raping her, then strangling her to death is a horror unimaginable to normal humans.
But there is another issue (…)

The adverse impact of the neo-liberal reforms being aggressively pursued in the name of globalisation since the 1970s in Latin America and the 1980s in Asia and Africa has resulted in certain common trends and patterns of underdevelopment. The Southern continents need to not only realise this but also learn from each other’s experience and forge stronger political alliances and economic integration that they seem to be already moving towards independently in each of these continents. In the (…)

Iran has restarted its nuclear enrichment programme. This follows the nuclear explosions made by India, Pakistan and North Korea. These steps have been taken within the confines of international law. India and Pakistan had not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea had legally pulled out of the same in 2003. Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy sources within the NPT. Yet the prominent world powers have imposed sanctions against India, Pakistan and North Korea (…)

After 34 days of devastating war between Israel and Lebanon, a prominent question that crops up is: what has actually been accomplished? To put it concisely, while the Israeli aggression has achieved something, it has solved nothing. Undeniably the Israeli leaders can record this achievement: the Israelis got what they wanted-a timely provocation to annihilate the Hezbollah once and for all as well as send a warning to Iran to refrain from producing nuclear fuel or face a military invasion (…)

It is a tragedy, when it is not a comedy, that relations between Pakistan and India have remained at an absurd level even after 60 years when the country was divided along incredibly ununderstandable lines. Those who have known what happened when India was partitioned and are still alive will understand those traumatic times which later generations will never relise.
At the lowest level of comedy, the Muslim League which spearheaded the campaign for a Pakistan would never give their (…)

The Gram Panchayats have become nodal points of grassroot democracy as well as direct democracy. After the 73rd Constitutional Amendment in the Panchayati Raj Act, a background has been created to move towards turning Panchayats into an instrument of self-government rather than working as a mere implementing agency of the government’s line of functioning. The first Round Table of Ministers of Panchayati Raj, held in Kolkata in 2004, clearly delineated the goal of the Panchayati Raj as (…)

It was at a very young age and before I became a Communist I was convinced that there was neither any god nor God (with capital G). In other words, it was not God who created man in this image. In fact, it was man who invented God because there were many things in nature which he could not explain. These included even such phenomena as eclipse of moon or of sun (Chandra Grahan or Suraj Grahan). In fact he did not even know the phenomenon of rains which would often be a boon for tillers of (…)

It was a massacre of innocents by all counts. What happened at the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal in the early morning of December 3 was not just a tragedy but a heinous crime which killed nearly two thousand and hospitalised many more, it brings out something much more ghastly than the hazards of modern industrialisation.
The enormity of the crime—unprecedented in our times—lies not merely in any negligence on the part of the workers and superintending staff behind the leakage of the (…)