March 2009

The policy of rapprochement with Washington, as has been steadfastly pursued by PM Manmohan Singh, has alienated large sections of the people from the principal ruling party, the Indian National Congress. Though the Congress spokesmen publicly defend this policy, the party itself is not going all out to highlight it in the election campaign.
The fact is that the economic reforms, implemented by the US favourites, Manmohan and P. Chidambaram in particular, have accentrated negative (…)

As Sri Lanka’s long-drawn civil war is drawing to a close, human rights abuses by both the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are reaching unprecedented proportions.
In a telling commentary on the status of Sri Lanka’s human rights situation, the International Coordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutions in December 2007 downgraded the accreditation of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of Sri Lanka after it was established (…)

Communication
I am both an admirer and life subscriber of Mainstream (No. 1593). I am deeply touched and gratified to read the feeling of distress expressed by some of the justice-holders of our society in the March 21, 2009 issue of Mainstream: “In defence of Professor Lotika Sarkar”. I would like to join the signatories in supporting this cause, and would like to do whatever possible to get back the occupancy of the house to Professor Lotika Sarkar. I have known Lotika from 1948, when we (…)

Obama is certainly a new phenomenon for America in more honestly diagnosing the country’s major problems and bringing a change from the Bush policy—to change the diagnosis to suit favourite remedies.
Security and democracy, two watch-words of her policy which should do honour and invest pride in any country if it honestly implements them, have earned her hostility and the ire of major chunks of the international community. The Americans, caught in a seemingly unending war with Iraq (…)

With the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street icons, there was growing recession which affected the US, the European Union (EU) and Japan. This was the result of large scale defaults in the US housing market as the banks went on providing risky loans without adequate security and the repaying capacity of the borrower. The principal source of transmission of the crisis has been the real sector, generally referred to as the ‘Main Street’. This crisis engulfed the United States in (…)

The dragging-on of the Presidential talks with leaders of different political parties has no doubt exasperated the patience of the average citizen as much as the President himself. What has been found is that no political formation worth the name has been able to muster sufficient support to ensure a majority in the Lok Sabha.
What we have to thank our stars about is the fact that the entire game of elections is played within the four corners of the Constitution which was written as (…)

Global Democracy
Democracy at any level—global, regional, national or at the level of communities—means, above all, peace and justice, filled stomachs, health, education, shelter; all regulated by an organisation in which citizens collectively regulate their political, social and economic affairs themselves in a manner that their individual freedoms are not restricted and liberty is enhanced.
Peace requires resolution of disputes and differences in a just manner through (…)

Ordinary terms used by ordinary people to express significant experiences can be turned into hate speech. The word “conversion”, for example, means a profound experience of personal or social transformation. For Ambedkar, conversions were a symbolic expression of protest against caste. In one of his public discourses, he had said that “though born a Hindu, he will never die as one”. His outbursts were primarily because of the personal and social trauma that he and his community had undergone (…)

Much is to be gained by viewing the contem-porary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they (…)

Introduction
Bureaucratic implementation of the NREGA has bypassed the Panchayati Raj Institutions which were intended to play an important role in planning and executing this flagship programme to respond to the local needs of the people. As a result several problems ranging from corruption to poor planning and the arbitrary management of the scheme have crippled the potentially valuable measure to provide sustenance to the rural poor. This was the tenor of the deliberations of some 1200 (…)