Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Agnipath is not the reform the armed forces need

By Dilip -
The structure of the military has immense ramifications for security, and also for social organisation at large. The Agnipath scheme is a major structural reform with consequences both for the armed forces and society at large. Some reforms and restructuring of the armed forces was overdue. Sometimes, scepticism about reforms reflects an underlying status quo bias, rather than an assessment of needs. But it is also the case that this Agnipath is as much about creating a political illusion of reform as it is about addressing the armed forces’ needs. The spin given to the reform needs to be treated with a lot more caution....

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History Archive: Communist Party of India's resolution on Pakistan and National Unity, September 1942

By Dilip -
Pakistan and National Unity is an important position paper of the Communist Party of India, and a far-reaching text in the history of the Indian communist movement. The resolution dated September 19, 1942 contains an outline of the CPI's support for what it called the 'just essence of the Pakistan demand'; and the Report by Gangadhar Adhikari is a detailed explanation of the resolution. The resolution was confirmed by the First Congress of the CPI in May 1943.  Its arguments may be contrasted with the pamphlet titled Who Rules Pakistan? published in Bombay in August 1948, as a 'Communist Party publication' - and is one of the earliest position documents of the Communist Party of Pakistan.  The document is titled File CPI-31/1942 ; and forms part of the P.C. Joshi Archives at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The text of the resolution and report is also available in the book entitled Remembering Dr  Gangadhar Adhikari: Selections from Writings, Part 2 ; e...
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The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
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'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
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Pakistan's First Law & Labour Minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal's Resignation Letter, October 1950

By Dilip -
Mr. J.N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan On 8th October, 1950 My Dear Prime Minister, It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustration at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses of East Bengal that I feel compelled to tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet . It is proper that I should set forth in detail the reasons, which have prompted me to take this decision in this important juncture of the history of Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent. (1)  Before I narrate the remote and immediate causes of my resignation, it may be useful to give a short background of important events that have taken place during the period of my co-operation with the League, Having been approached by a few prominent League leaders of Bengal in February 1943, I agreed to work with them in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. After the fall of the Fazlul Haque Ministry in March 1943, with a party of 21 Scheduled Caste M.L.As,...
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Ben Marks - The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class

By Dilip -
For 2,000 years, the peach was the iconic fruit of China, an auspicious symbol of good health and a long life. But from August of 1968 until roughly the fall of the following year, the mango was China’s most revered produce item, whose meaning was unwittingly bestowed upon it by none other than Mao Zedong. Now an  exhibition  about the mango’s short-lived sanctification has opened at Museum Reitberg in Zurich, Switzerland. Continuing through June 16, 2013, the show is organized around more than 60 Mao-era mango items—from Mao mango medallions to textiles bearing mango imagery—donated to the museum by scholar and author Alfreda Murck, who also edited the exhibition’s  catalog  and will be speaking at the  Capital Literary Festival  in Beijing on March 2, 2013. The circumstances leading to the mango’s prominence as a symbol of the working class have their roots in 1958, when Mao Zedong instituted a series of agricultural and industrial reforms...
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The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals: Written by Benedetto Croce (1925)

By Dilip -
Benedetto Croce , Hegelian philosopher and Italian citizen, turned against Mussolini after Matteoti’s murder in 1924. Croce believed that liberty is not a natural right but an earned right that arises out of struggle for its maintenance. He defined civilization as the continual vigilance against barbarism. Croce drafted the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals ; (written in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist intellectuals, by Giovanni Gentile). Croce defied Mussolini in the face of intimidation and coined the term onagrocrazia (‘government by asses’) to refer to the regime. He was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to complete a government questionnaire regarding the ‘racial background’ of Italian intellectuals; and called fascism a 'moral illness'. It may be recalled that fascism had admirers in colonial India . (See also a brief history of Indian fascism). The Manifesto is an important historical document. It forms part of the archive of global d...
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Muslim girl meets Hindu boy. How our forbidden love blossomed in Canada

By Dilip -
I met the man of my parents' dreams when I was a 20-year-old sophomore in university. Young and naive, I thought love meant meeting someone who my family would least resist; someone they'd "approve" of and proudly talk about with their relatives back home in Pakistan. My ideal partner would be a Sunni Muslim, in the upper-middle to rich socio-economic class, fair-skinned and from a "respectable" family. Deep down I knew checklist man was not right for me. I kept this checklist in the back of my mind. It's not something I ever questioned. I just knew deviating from these desirable traits would not sit well with my loved ones. But deep down I knew checklist man was not right for me — no matter how much my family tried to convince me otherwise. He wanted to put the expectations of his parents above everything else and follow the life path they had laid out for him. I, on the other hand, wanted to explore all that life could offer, make my own decisio...
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Did Stalin poison Lenin?

By Dilip -
Vladamir Lenin, the founder of Russian communism, may have died because of stress, family medical history or of poison given to him by his successor Joseph Stalin.. Dr. Harry Vinters, a neurologist at the University of California in Los Angeles and Lev Lurie, a Russian historian, re-examined Lenin’s personal and autopsy records and clinical history for an annual conference on famous people's deaths at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where the deaths of figures like King Tut, Christopher Columbus, Simon Bolivar and Abraham Lincoln were re-examined. Lenin had died on January 21, 1924 at the age of 53.  The Soviet leader had suffered several mysterious strokes before he died. Lurie, the historian, believes that while Lenin was already experiencing bad health after having suffered several strokes, Stalin may have poisoned him after a bitter argument. Lenin had initially supported Stalin’s rise to power, but he later began supporting Leon Trotsky. Lenin h...
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