India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
Ajaz Ashraf The Supreme Court’s majority decision to club the issue of women’s entry into the Sabarimala temple with pending matters of similar nature and refer all these to a larger, seven-member bench for consideration echoes, even though subliminally, the Hindu Right’s arguments and cribs against religious reforms. These pending matters include whether…
Apoorvanand That unanimity hurt. It did. One had hoped, or wished to have a hope, that there would be a chink in the armour somewhere. An ambiguity. The absence of it—the full glare of a “unanimous” majoritarianism—came like a stab in the heart of the idea of India. To be frank, there was not much…
Siddharth Varadarajan The Supreme Court’s verdict in the Ayodhya matter has settled the ‘title suit’ in favour of the main Hindu plaintiff—essentially the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—but it is clear that there is much more at stake for the country than the ownership of 2.77 acres of land on which a mosque stood for 470 years…
Bharathy Singaravel On Saturday, November 2, the Tamil Nadu BJP posted a couplet by the legendary Tamil poet, Thiruvalluvar. The chosen verse was taken from the Kadavul Vazhthu (In Praise of the Creator) chapter of Valluvar’s Tirukkural—the famed compilation of 1330 kurrals (as the couplets are known). Gopalkrishna Gandhi in his 2015 translations of the…
Firoz Bakht Ahmed In the Shahjahanabadi old city of Delhi, between the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort, both monuments reminding of the Mughal pristine glory, a green and glossy patch covers an area where once stood the houses of the Muslim nobility. They were leveled after the Indian revolt against the British in 1857….
Courtesy: The Wire The plans to officially mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary are on course. At the ground level, however, the ugly face of communalism continues to rear its head in one virulent incident after another. It was an issue which agitated Gandhi until his dying breath and, in fact, was uppermost in his…
Rahul Mukherji Has Indian nationalism turned utterly exclusivist? What would one of the icons of nationalism, Swami Vivekananda, have to say about this shift? Nationalism, after all, is a battle for the myths that create a nation. The practice of Indian secularism, despite its pitfalls, has distinguished the country from many of its neighbours. India…
(This article was published in Mainstream on 9 August, 1997. We are reproducing it here as it is still as relevant today.) As the country is getting ready to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of attainment of freedom, many memories come back to those who were fortunate to be witness to those momentous events. The subcontinent—both…
[When Raosaheb Kasbe’s Zot was published in Marathi in 1978, RSS cadres made a public bonfire of it at the Janata Party convention in Pune that year. The book presented an incisive critique of M.S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts, the main ideological treatise of the RSS. Kasbe traced the historical roots of cultural nationalism as…
Press Release Battini Rao, Convenor, People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) expresses its concern over the two FIRS being filed in Odisha (Kandhmal and Katak) against Shri Kumar Prashant, president of Gandhi Peace Foundation, allegedly for hurting sentiments of local RSS members, spreading lies about RSS and instigating…
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