May 25, 2007

The Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance Government has just completed three years in office. On this occasion it has presented a “Report to the People”. What does this Report convey? According to the Report, in these three years the UPA Government has taken several steps to (i) improve the social and economic condiitions of the people; (ii) create infrastructure in both the urban and rural areas; (iii) build a harmonious society; and (iv) strengthen India’s relations with all (…)

The UP election verdict has stirred the nation as few things recently have. For one thing, it was wholly unexpected. Every political pundit or soothsayer worth his name had predicted a hung Assembly. Ms Mayawati romped home with an absolute majority. There was no major party that did not hear the distant roar of Mayawati’s approaching juggernaut. But each still wallowed in the comfort of its wishful thought that she will still need their support before she could form a government. Mayawati (…)

The Bahujan Samaj Party President, Mayawati, has led her party to victory in the recently held general elections to the State Assembly of Uttar Pradesh. While political observers and the media were agreed that the BSP would emerge as the largest party in the Assembly and there were speculations that the party would depend on outside support to form a government, no one had said that it would get an absolute majority. Mayawati was the Chief Minister of the State thrice earlier, in 1995, 1997, (…)

The name of Canadian-Syrian Mahel Arar is not unfamiliar today in the rest of the world.
The travails and tribulations of this young software engineer who became a victim of the US Government’s extraordinary rendition programme have been recounted umpteen times. We very well know how he was seized by CIA operatives during a stopover at New York in 2002 and was secretly sent to Syria. Lodged in a grave-like cell in Syria, Arar was repeatedly tortured to extract information which he (…)

Who is Chandramohan Srilamantula? Is he such a famous artist that the entire art community is staging protests against his arrest? Actually, Chandramohan is only 23 and still a student, and it is his project work that’s made an impact far beyond his wildest imagination.
A few details in case you missed them. The Baroda University’s Fine Arts faculty is acknowledged as one of the finest art schools in the country. It has a tradition of asking its final year students to mount an (…)

It’s scary to realise that decisions affecting the lives of multitudes are often in the hands of crazy men, drunkards and egomaniacs. A passing fancy, a momentary whim—and wars break out, massacres are launched.
We dismiss Caligula as history’s greatest debauchee, but he reigned as Roman Emperor for four tyrannical years. When not in the thick of mass orgies, he was busy arranging lavish dinner parties for his horse.
Nero killed his wife and also his mother. The dictator (…)

[(May 27 this year marks the fortythird death anniversary of the architect of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru; on this occasion we are carrying here the text of his address, as the first Prime Minister of independent India, at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds, on May 10, 1957, to observe the centenary of our First War of Independence that the Britishers had contemptuously described as Sepoy Mutiny. This is available in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (May 1-July 31, 1957), Vol. 38 (edited by (…)

[(The following are tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru by some noted public figures, members of the National Committee for the Commemoration of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centenary; these were published in a collection Nehru: The Nation Remembers brought out by the National Committee on the occasion of Nehru’s birth centenary (November 14, 1989). )]
It was the winter of 1928. The session of the Indian National Congress was being held in Calcutta. My uncle, Dr B.C. Roy, being the General Secretary of (…)

For four decades and more, this gentle colossus strode our Indian world and his place among the great figures of our time is secure. But his uniqueness lay in the unobtrusive opulence of endowment which gave him, in the thick of politics and in the face even of frustrations, a peculiar refinement and grace of spirit. It was not only that he was “a man without malice and without fear” but that he carried an ache in his mind and heart, an ache which betokened kinship with the whole wide world. (…)

Jawaharlal Nehru while in power, it must be conceded, could not implement many of his ideas which he so passionately advocated when fighting against the British during our freedom struggle. He himself admitted:
Some years earlier I would not have been so hesitant. There was a definiteness about my thinking and objectives then, which has faded away since and events of the past few years in India, China, Europe and all over the world have been confusing, upsetting and distressing, and the (…)