April 5, 2008

On the last day of the 2007-08 financial year the Union Government unveiled a slew of measures to control inflation which is at a 13-month high of 6.68 per cent. These included such steps as abolising import duty on all crude edible oils, including palm and soya, banning the export of non-basmati rice and pulses. The government decided to raise the minimum export price of basmati to $ 1200 per ton from $ 1100 per ton with the objective of discouraging exports and increasing its availability (…)

[(DOCUMENT)]
Taslima Nasreen has been forced to leave India. This might have brought a sense of relief, and even a degree of triumphalism, to the West Bengal and the Central governments. This is also a cause of deep frustration for all those like us who have been trying to defend her human rights and secure for her justice and a treatment in tradition with Indian culture and civilisation. What is most disconcerting is that her departure in the circumstances in which it took place, is a (…)

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s retort to the Chinese saying that the Dalai Lama stands for non-violence must be considered as one right reaction among so many reactions emanating from New Delhi regarding the recent happenings in Tibet. There is indeed a need for overall reappraisal of India’s traditional policy. One need not go into the question of whether it was correct on the part of India to acquiesce in China’s brutal occupation of Tibet in 1950, and even more brutal suppression of the (…)

Why is China in jitters over the unrest in Tibet marking the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s forced escape from Lhasa? The Buddhist spiritual leader had to flee his homeland as much to save his life as to preserve the autonomy of his hoary land of birth. The idea behind the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, following hostilities, in which an estimated two thousand Tibetans perished, was that India would stand by Tibet. But the starry-eyed leadership of Nehru succumbed to China’s designs (…)

For long I have been saying that the Indian state’s founder-premier Nehru was grievously wrong in defining secularism as the fulcrum of the country’s policy. Secularism merely meant that the state would be neutral between religions. In the context of the country’s Partition and carnage occasioned by religious hatred, the need was for a policy with a positive content—namely, harmonisation of the psyche and unification of hearts of the deeply divided communities. It needed inter-religious (…)

Anti-China protests broke out in Lhasa and other parts of Tibet on March 14, 2008. They have spread to the neighbouring Sichuan and Qinghai provinces that incorporated what used to be the Amdo region of Tibet before China took possession of Tibet in 1959. The Dalai Lama has called for an international probe into whether “cultural genocide—deliberate or not—was taking place in his homeland”. (The Times of India, March 17, 2008, Lucknow) Samdhang Rinpoche, the Prime Minister of the Tibetan (…)

Can the Left really unite? In the three decades since Independence, the unity of the Left has virtually been a will-o’-the wisp of Indian politics.
In the crucial years immediately following Independence the Left chose to go into disarray. The Socialists, overwhelmed by the emerging power-structure of the Congress, decided to leave it, while the Communists in a fit of unwisdom went for a sectarian course preferring frontal collision with the newly installed Government. In three years, (…)

The Sixth Central Pay Commission has recommended implementation of a Performance Related Incentive Scheme to reward good employees and improve the quality of government work. Government departments will be allowed to retain one-half of the savings made by them as bonus to their employees. Say, the Public Works Department is spending Rs 1 crore a year for the maintenance of a particular road. It manages to do the same work in Rs 50 lakhs. One-half of the savings of Rs 50 lakhs will be (…)

[(COMMUNICATION)]
This is with reference to the article “Strengthening Molestation Law for Women’s Safety in India” by Minakshi Sethy and Prabira Sethy in Mainstream (March 8, 2008).
The menace of sexual harassment faced by women everyday is undeniably taking on dangerous proportions. It needs to be looked at very seriously because without a clear understanding of why this phenomenon is spreading so widely across the country, we cannot really hope to combat it, much less get it under (…)

Although democracy has been restored in Pakistan, it is yet to be seen whether India has taken any lesson out of it. New Delhi’s handling of military dictatorships in the subcontinent during the last thirty years does not really arouse much hope and it will not be an overstatement to say that India’s meek and unimaginative response to the Army dictatorship of Myanmar has served neither our own interests nor has it been able to do justice to the bigger cause of democracy.
To what extent (…)