Media Voice

So, one of India’s most wanted men, Mallojula Koteswara Rao a.k.a. Kishenji, has been eliminated from the Maoist theatre. There are many who are heaving a sigh of relief, there are others who argue that this is the beginning of the end of the Maoists. But arguments steeped in speculation are essentially bad arguments. They leave out the context, and are therefore myopic. Kishenji’s death in an encounter on November 24 came even as parleys were on between the Maoists and the Trinamool Congress...

There is something perverse in the fact that the politics of poverty always brings out the poverty in the politics of the day. So when the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, told the Supreme Court about the commission’s desire to fix Rs 32 a day as the poverty line in urban India, the ensuing debate metamorphosed into all about politics. Number-crunching, when about an emotive issue such as poverty, is less of an exercise in economics, and more of political one...

When Mamata Banerjee swept away the Left Front and became Chief Minister of West Bengal earlier this year, expectations had preceded her. She had many tasks at hand, one of them being bringing Maoists to the negotiating table. Some 100 days into her tenure, she has scored a few points, including a tripartite agreement with the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). But restoring peace in the Darjeeling hills is not the same as doing it in Jangalmahal forests. The more days pass by, it becomes obvious...