Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015)
Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey).
Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst); Ajay Bhardwaj (Vancouver).
Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
UPA’S MISPLACED PRIORITIES
Daya Varma and Vinod Mubayi
The performance of the UPA in its second term of government seems to be far worse than in the first term. Although the leadership has not talked much lately about the Maoist “threat”, which is any case more a symptom than a cause, the government has not taken any steps to address the plight of Adivasis, tribals and forest dwellers, whose only friends seem to be the Maoists. BJP-led governments in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh and their allied regimes in Orissa and even Bihar are doing whatever they want to, while the Congress leaders are indulging in paying homage to obscurantist, fundamentalist and religious bigots. Read more…
BABA RAMDEV’S ANTI CORRUPTION FAST: NEW FACE OF COMMUNAL POLITICS
Ram Puniyani
Since this article was written, Baba Ramdev has given up his fast. He promised to fast until death if his demands are not met, but being too coward to die, found some alibi. From time to time India produces great men and women but also from time to time it produces great crooks. Baba Ramdev is the latest fraud who combines everything despicable into one person. People who assembled around Ramdev in the anticorruption fast are like people who assembled in Ayodhya to demolish the Babri Masjid. In both cases the bone-less government allowed the assembly but used its baton in the wrong one. Read more…
PAKISTAN AFTER OSAMA
Pervez Hoodbhoy
The killing of Osama bin Laden could provide Pakistan an opportunity to reverse its downward slide, though changing course will not be easy. The country must decide whether to decisively confront Islamist violence, or continue with the military’s current policy of supporting jihadi militants with one hand even as it slaps them with the other. Read more…
NEPAL’S BALANCE OF FORCES AND THE FUTURE OF PEOPLES LIBERATION ARMY
Peter Tobin
Democracy and Class Struggle published this report from Peter Tobin, a correspondent who is currently in Nepal. It offers background and analysis of extremely important controversies that have sharpened within Nepal, and within that country’s revolutionary Maoist forces, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The original piece assumes a great deal of knowledge about Nepal (and its political acronyms), so we have inserted brief explanations [in brackets] at appropriate places. Read more…
RAMDEV’S NON-PROFIT OUTFITS FACE PROBE IN THE US
Iftikhar Gilani
From the view point of medical ethics, every single concoction that Ramdev’s pharmacy makes and sells is a fraud and in many countries would be treated as an unethical, if not a criminal act. Because many others do things like what Baba Ramdev does, it is ignored on technical grounds. But for a person who makes false threats of fast unto death against some kind of corruption, his shady charity but otherwise a business has come to light as this article in Tehelka shows. Read more…
FORBESGANJ FIRING: POLICE KILLED WOMEN, INFANT FROM POINTBLANK
Mumtaz Alam Falahi
In December 2010 Samata Party, a traditional ally of Bhartiya Janata Party, came to power in Bihar with overwhelming majority. Installing its leader Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister and ending the long rule of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Yadav. Whatever other mistakes Lalu Yadav might have committed, he ensured the safety of Muslims. This is not so under Nitish Kumar as apparent from the brutality against a group of Muslims. Read more…
2002 RIOTS IN GUAJARAT: ANOTHER POLICE OFFICER BLAMES MODI
Meghdoot Sharon, Gaurav Shah, CNN-IBN
Yet another top police officer in Gujarat has gone public, raising questions over the conduct of the Gujarat police force in controlling the communal riots in 2002. Retired Gujarat Director General of Police RN Bhattacharya has said that there was a feeling among officers that the lower rank officials had failed to safeguard the rights of the citizens. Read more…
OBITUARY: M.F. HUSAIN: VICTIM OF INTOLERANCE
Ram Puniyani
On 9th June 2011, M.F. Husain breathed his last in a London Hospital, and was later buried in the cemetery in London as per his wish that he should be buried at a place of his death. The most celebrated painter of India, more Indian than any of his detractors died, away from his home, due to self imposed exile. This self imposed exile was due to the threats of Hindu fundamentalists. The renowned painter called by many as Picasso of India, had the fate similar to that of Picasso, who also went into self exile in the regime of Fascist Franco of Spain. Read more…
M F HUSAIN: WHEN THE NATION LOSES ITS OWN NARRATIVE
Sadanand Menon
The moment of M F Husain’s death is sombre and we could do with a serious self-evaluation of where we stand with respect to our arts. The hounding out of a 90-year-old painter who was constantly striving to make us look at ourselves from a multi-cultural, secular, syncretic perspective, and our failure to ensure his return before he passed away five years later, should worry us about where we are heading as a nation. The fact that India could not see itself through the eyes of Husain and, instead, interpreted his epiphanic invocation and celebration of our civilisational diversity as something narrow and divisive, points to the rapid thickening and blocking of our national arteries, constricting the openness we so hypocritically assume as our cultural credo and hastening the spread of iron in the soul. Read more…
M.F. HUSAIN 95 ARTIST: India’s Most Prominent Painter Was Hounded by Hindu Fundamentalist
Muneeza Naqvi
Excerpts
“Husain had lived in Dubai since 2006 after receiving death threats from Hindu hard-liners in India for a nude painting of a woman shaped like India’s map, often described as Mother India in popular arts…” Read more…
CPI(ML) MOURNS THE PASSING OF M F HUSAIN
(Liberation News Service June 10, 2011)
MF Husain’s death at the age of 96 has robbed the world and India of a towering artist. All his life, he never stopped painting, and he acquired international renown as a modern painter with a distinctive style. Read more…
OBITUARY: ROSALYN S. YALOW (Nobel Medical Physicist, Dies at 89)
Denise Gellene
Rosalyn S. Yalow, a medical physicist who persisted in entering a field largely reserved for men to become only the second woman to earn a Nobel Prize in Medicine, died on Monday in the Bronx, where she had lived most of her life. She was 89. Read more…
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