NOVEMBER 2012

NOVEMBER 2012

Cover Story and Featured Stories

Inside this abyss, Vidarbha is flooded with thousands of tales of tragedy. And the cold-blooded truth is, there is no end to this documentary of death and dying. Farmer suicides are only a symbolic pointer
Akash Bisht/Sadiq Naqvi Pandharkawada, Yavatmal (Maharashtra)

MGNREGS: fake and fraudulent

In the deep interiors of Yavatmal, crores of Rupees have been swindled by an organised mafia while poor villagers have been pushed into abysmal poverty
Akash Bisht/Sadiq Naqvi Pandharkawada, Yavatmal

Vidarbha: Insatiable and Corrupt

While farmers suffer and their parched land craves water, most irrigation projects in Vidarbha worth thousands of crores of rupees have turned into gigantic scams
Akash Bisht/Sadiq Naqvi Pandharkawada, Yavatmal

The Suicide of Sisyphus

Hardnews enters the heart of darkness at Ground Zero in Vidarbha and discovers an infinite epic of tragedy amidst an epidemic of multi-crore irrigation, MGNREGS, Bt Cotton and other scams. From this epicentre of mass suicides of farmers, we bring you in-depth investigations and special stories from the deepest interiors
Hardnews Bureau Delhi

Memorial to a Genocide: Insist on justice

Would those who encouraged the victimisers to kill in Gujarat be willing to apologise or make a conciliatory gesture to the victims? That would be a confession of guilt and guilt is what Narendra Modi is constantly denying
Romila Thapar

Memorial to a Genocide: Memory as Resistance

Many more public memorials to the dead are required. These may serve as constant reminders to us, heirs to a century of massacres, and spinners of dreams for a better world
Mukul Mangalik

Memorial to a Genocide: Citizenship of Junk

We built a monument here, to the witness as storyteller, to the activist as historian. And to the spectator as a citizen who will not be allowed to forget
Shiv Visvanathan

Apartheid: Colour of class & colour of skin

In South Africa, apartheid still exists. And workers suffer the most, exploited in sub-human conditions by white multinationals
Ajay Kumar Johannesburg (South Africa)

KaliKatha Via Bypass

The cliché of the ‘villainous Marwari’ continues to live in chauvinist Bengali minds
Garga Chatterjee Kolkata

The Myth of Good People

The fact is that ‘opened-up’ India is a node in the gigantic network of global capital that does not have any moral qualms about corruption. Can Arvind Kejriwal’s rhetoric arrest this monster?
Anand Teltumbde Kharagpur (West Bengal)

Habib Tanvir: More than a legend

The story of Habib Tanvir is parallel to the story of the emergence of modern Indian theatre in independent India. His initiation coincides with the quest to redefine Indian theatre and other art forms around the 1940s with the formation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)
Salim Arif Mumbai

The Making of a Sadhvi

Indeed, the ritual value of sadhvis is considerable. They give sermons, conduct prayers and take general charge of the spiritual needs of the laity
Namrata R Ganneri Mumbai

More Stories from this Issue

November 1984, Once Again

It’s twenty-eight years after, so why are the Delhi University authorities so morally afraid of some telling pictures of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs? Why did they deny permission to the students to stand with the pictures inside the campus, and hold a floating exhibition travelling around the country on the idea of injustice as public memory? What compels this act of Chinese-style censorship?

Hobsbawm’s Viennese heart

Eric Hobsbawm, who died recently at the age of 95, was admired for speaking against social banditry. Throughout his life, the illustrious historian nursed his conscience and highlighted the barbarity of modern times.

Why did Hobsbawn think and write the way he did? Did his work emerge from a particular cultural milieu? How much is Vienna responsible for shaping the thought of one of the greatest intellectuals of recent times?

Plots for the Picking, Writers!

None of my friends gasped with righteous indignation (better known as a classic Arnab Goswami moment) when Yann Martel, author of Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, said recently, “In some ways, India is a horrible place. It’s corrupt, violent; there are inequalities that are disturbing. At the same time, the place gave us Mahatma Gandhi. It’s a place of idealism and corruption.” We clucked and shook our heads sadly instead — come on, it’s hard to disagree with him, isn’t it? And that got me thinking about literature.

The Silence Over Corporate Corruption

In the last issue of Hardnews, we wrote about a major Indian business house with growing interest in the UK and beyond, whose senior employees were detained by the London