March 15, 2008

The presiding officers of both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha need to be commended for the measures they are taking to ensure that parliamentary proceedings are not disrupted by members raising issues that are not in the list of business. Such frequent disruptions have caused immense damage to the functioning of Parliament over the years and, as the Lok Sabha Speaker has time and again underscored, the real casualty in the process has been parliamentary democracy itself. Pulling up the errant (…)

The following write up is a follow-up of the author’s earlier sequel to our statement on the nuclear deal with the US. [“Do We Have Democracy?”, Mainstream, February 9, 2008] At that time, it was not known that while dismissing the petition challenging the action of the Central Government in entering into the deal without even its reference to Parliament, an observation was made by the judges that there was no provision in the Constitution which required the executive to take approval of (…)

In the months and years following the Gujarat genocide of 2002, many from the camp of Hindutva characterised that province as the “laboratory” where an “experiment” had been carried out. They proclaimed that the success of the experiment meant that the process could be replicated in other parts of the country so as to achieve their ultimate goal, a “Hindu Rashtra”.
Such talk became restrained after the defeat of the NDA in the general election of 2004, but it did not cease. Since then, (…)

I am a 39-year-old advocate practising at Alipore District Sessions and Criminal Court in West Bengal and residing at P-1 State Bank Park, !st Floor, Kolkata 700063. I am a human rights activist and a member of the ‘Association for Protection of Democratic Rights’ (APDR), a pioneer human rights organisation in West Bengal. On March 5, 2008 a fact finding team consisting of five members of APDR, namely, myself, Siddhartha Sengupta, Anup Dutta, Prashanta Halder and Mrs Ratna Bhowmick went to (…)

On the very day the Union Budget 2008-09 was presented in Parliament, Bhikhu Parekh, in his discourse on India, carried in The Indian Express, raised certain important questions. He argued that during the last few years it has come to be widely held that India’s salvation lies in its economic development. It is believed that this will reduce poverty through the trickle down effect, integrate the country in the global economy and make it a major economic and (…)

The people’s protest against Special Economic Zones in various parts of the country, including at Nandigram in West Bengal, stagnation in agriculture, import of foodgrains, widespread suicide of farmers—all these are systems of simmering discontent in the agricultural sector. What is highlighted today in the national scene is the image of “incredible India” and “shining India”. We hear often about India as a country with a very high economic growth, a country with the highest numbers of (…)

American diplomacy was on splendid display this week in two key Asian capitals—Beijing and New Delhi. China and India rolled out the red carpet to visiting cabinet officials from Washington. By a curious coincidence, the two top US officials—Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates—chose the same block of dates to befriend the two Asian “rivals”.
Amid the debris of the George W. Bush Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East, what is often (…)

The following article, sent quite sometime back, could not be used for unavoidable reasons. it is now being published on the occasion of Malati Chaudhuri’s tenth death anniversary.
Malati Chaudhuri (Numa) was born on July 26, 1904 in Kolkata and died on March 15, 1998 in Orissa. She was born in a Bengali middle class Brahmin family. She lost her father very early. Her mother was a teacher in Bethune college in Kolkata and had a sympathetic bend of mind towards Gandhiji’s ideas. Numa’s (…)

BOOK REVIEW
The Copy/South Dossier: Issues in the Economics, Politics and Ideology of Copyright in the Global South edited by Alan Story, Colin Darch and Debora Halbert; The Copy/South Research Group; Kent; 2006.
Theological affiliations apart, Mark Twain’s statement—“only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law in the planet”—is too tempting to be refuted, especially for the global South. If not, how can one make sense of most nations’ copyright periods (…)

The following piece, written by Taslima Nasreen in the nineties, brings out her views on women’s emancipation. Incidentally she is still at an undisclosed location in or near the Capital and not allowed to meet anyone, that is, in virtual imprisonment.
The other day, a foreign gentleman and I were talking about Bangladesh. He was rather bemused by the fact that Bangladesh had a woman prime Minister. “The women of your country are so liberated that you even have a woman Prime Minister!” he (…)