Articles

Results of the October 30 bypolls held in three Lok Sabha seats and twenty nine Assembly constituencies spread over thirteen states and the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli give us a glimpse of the changing political climate of India ahead of the crucial Assembly elections early next year. Usually bypolls tend to favour the governments in power, but the bypolls sprang several surprises, the most stunning being the results in BJP-ruled Himachal Pradesh where the Congress bagged all the three Assembly seats and the lone Lok Sabha seat for which bypolls were held. For the BJP, perhaps the most significant gain came from Telangana, where the BJP has managed to increase its strength by fielding a TRS defector as candidate. The other state where the BJP gained immensely is Assam...

Posted by: John Phoenix Seventy Six years ago, on February 18, 1946 around more 1000 sailors or “ratings” of the then Royal Indian Navy in Bombay declared a strike against the inhuman conditions. Next day morning, the rebellion spread to shore establishments and ships in Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, Mandapam, Visakhapatnam, and the Andaman Islands, soon taking the shape of a mutiny against the British Empire. During the event, seventy eight out of a total of 88 ships mutinied. The demands included, an end to the mistreatment of Indian sailors, release of all Indian political prisoners and personnel of Indian National Army (INA). Thousands of more sailors joined the action as workers, students and the toiling masses organised strikes and demonstrations in solidarity with the sailo...

Comrade Bani Bhattacharya, mother of Comrade Dipankar, passed away on 5 June evening. She was 92. Comrades Swadesh Bhattacharya, Kunal, Amar, Kartick Pal and several comrades from the Greater Kolkata region joined Comrade Dipankar to bid her goodbye the next afternoon. A meeting was held in her memory on 18 June near her residence at Subhasgram. Below we reproduce excerpts from Comrade Dipankar's tribute to his mother from his Facebook page (posted on 7 June). "My mother was born in Bogura district of erstwhile East Bengal and current Bangladesh. Like millions of her contemporaries her life was also disrupted by the traumatic developments of the 1940s when her family migrated from Dubchachia in Bogura to Balurghat in Dinajpur (currently headquarter of South Dinajpur district of Wes...

Posted by: John Phoenix Smothering dissent and civil liberties has become one of the striking hallmarks of the Modi government’s nine years of fascist rule in India. Today, there are rarely any democratic rights movements, where the protestors have not been slapped with a plethora of cases, extending from draconian laws like Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and sedition. No farmer, worker, activist, journalist, lawyer or artist can assume safety against the crackdown on their civil liberties. Father Stan Swamy (26 April 1937- 5 July 2021), a democratic rights activist who died in jail after long and unjust incarceration once said, “What is happening to me is not something unique, happening to me alone. It is the broader process that is taking place all over the country.… Promi...

by Shilpa Prasad Since 2014, India is witness to an alarming rise in communal aggression and hatred in the name of majoritarian Hindutva nationalism. In what has been identified as an aggressive fascist regime, the Sangh Parivar has utilized hatred as it means, both socially and electorally, and have captured both state and non-state actors to turn a blind eye or act in furtherance of their agenda. One of the chosen means of creating, spreading, and consolidating this hate, is through hate speech. Hate speech is speech that falls outside the ambit of protected speech / free speech, and is speech that Waldron terms “group defamation”. Certain groups, on account of historical discrimination, are particularly vulnerable, including gender, caste, and religion. Hate speech is the exp...

by Saurabh Naruka The Modi government came to power in 2014 with the promise of inclusive growth, Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas. In these 9 years of Modi rule most of his promises have turned out to be lies. The promise of delivering a $5 trillion economy by 2024 is a far cry now. These years have witnessed dwindling growth, high unemployment, skyrocketing prices of essentials, increasing inequality, falling rupee, record bank write-offs, an unprecedented privatization spree and selling off of national assets in the name of monetization scheme, a severe assault on farmers’ and workers’ rights, rising debt, and attacks on small and medium enterprises through the triple assault of demonetization, GST, and an unplanned lockdown. Growth and Per Capita Levels: Comparing the Numbers. ...

by Madhurima Bakshi The past nine years of BJP government led by Narendra Modi has witnessed outrageous attacks on environment laying the way for more and more corporate takeover of natural resources disregarding people’s rights. Environment regulations and guidelines have been diluted; tribunals and adjudicatory bodies made weakened while clearances are given recklessly to mining and other projects. BJP’s manifesto in 2019 stated ‘speed and effectiveness in issuing forest and environmental clearances’ showing their clear priority of corporate interest over ecology and biodiversity. Meanwhile, in the Environmental Performance Index 2022, India ranked the lowest in the world out of 180 countries last year. Nine years ago, India was ranked 155th. Rampant clearance to projects and ...

by Sucheta de The second tenure of the Narendra Modi led BJP government at centre started on 30th May 2019. After it assumed power in 2014, the Modi government is approaching a decade of ruling India. ‘Bahut hua nari par var, abki bar Modi sarkar’ (Enough with attacks on women, elect Modi government this time) was one of the slogans made popular through the high pitch propaganda machinery of the BJP before 2014 election. The propaganda of pro-women governance continued through subsequent slogans of ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ (save women, educate them), ‘selfie with daughter’ etc. While millions of rupees were spent in making these slogans popular, what remained to be seen was what changed for women in the New India under Modi regime. A glimpse of what women under Modi ...

by Avani Chokshi Clifton D’ Rozario 9 years of Indian Judiciary in Modi’s India “In the center of the counter-revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice.” - Franz Neumann, Behemoth The independence of the judiciary is a basic feature of the Constitution and of paramount importance to a functional democracy. It forms a vital component of the doctrine of separation of powers, whereby the organs of State are intended to check excess...

by Maitreyi Krishnan Avani Chokshi Clifton D’ Rozario The fascist project of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) which constitutes a concerted effort to undermine democratic institutions and to promote Hindutva nationalism, also engages in overt class warfare of the ruling class against the working class as one of its defining features. This phase of fascism has emerged in a context of global neoliberalism where capital is on the offensive - snatching back whatever gains were made by workers’ movements and grabbing whatever resources remain in the public domain through massive campaigns of privatization, land grab and environmental destruction. Alongside neoliberal economic policies that spell doom for the working class, there are nine lynchpins of the nine years of Modi’s regime. 1...