India

by Kumar Parwez In Bihar, the crisis hit BJP is desperate after being ousted from power. This land of socialist and communist movement has become a big challenge for it, where its designs have faced obstacles. All its game plans have been exposed, be it the attempt to create disturbances on Ram Navami in Biharsharif or at Sasaram. In the Sasaram violence case, ex-MLA of BJP, Jawahar Prasad has been arrested. In Biharsharif, the sword is dangling on local BJP MLA Sunil Singh. Days before the Ramnavami violence, BJP supported youtuber Manish Kashyap was arrested for spreading rumours of attacks on Bihari migrant workers in Tamil Nadu, on which BJP was trying to play politics. On the one hand BJP is trying to spread communal riots and hate, while on the other it is trying to garner...

The Modi administration has embarked on a diplomatic mission to retrieve the nation’s treasures that were plundered by colonizers Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Nataraja idol handed over by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in New Delhi on September 5, 2014. © AFP / AFP PHOTO/Prakash SINGH Weeks after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington, the US handed over 105 antiquities to the Indian Consulate in New York. This is seen as New Delhi’s latest achievement in its hunt for national treasures that were looted by colonizers, and more recently – stolen from India and sold in the West.  In the 86th edition of ‘Mann ki Baat’ aired in February 2022, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s monthly radio program in which he interacts wi...

by Clifton D’Rozario One does not go to a convention against fascism to get hold of a definitive analysis of fascism. One goes there to see what fascism means and does to people of different modes of existence, and how – and how effectively – they are resisting it. - K. Balagopal [1] Talk given at the 13th Balagopal Memorial Meeting held on 9th October 2022 at Hyderabad and organised by Human Rights Forum (HRF) The working class is being rendered evermore precarious with insecure jobs, lack of social security, exploitative working conditions, low wages, and union-busting. The reality is that over 90% of the workers are in unorganised sector[2] and 60% workers earn less than Rs. 375/- per day. Unemployment, is in fact, at a 40-year high. Indeed the precariousness...

Posted by: John Phoenix Har Ghar Tiranga. A tricolour on every roof. This 13-15 August call of the Modi government was supposed to be the high point of the official celebration of the 75th anniversary of India's independence, the much publicised 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav'. While the dominant media was immersed in amplifying this campaign and PM Modi's 9th successive Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Lal Qila, two news items from Rajasthan and Gujarat came as the starkest statements about the shape of things in today's India. Indra Meghwal, a 9-year-old Dalit child studying at a Saraswati Vidyamandir school in Surana village in Jalore District of Rajasthan, who was brutally beaten up on 20 July by teacher Chail Singh allegedly for drinking water from a pot 'reserve...

India’s downslide on the Global Hunger Index continues uninterrupted. From the 94th position among 107 countries covered in 2020, India’s ranking dropped by seven positions to 101st out of 116 in 2021 and by another six positions in the latest 2022 index dropping to the 107th rank among 121 countries. Except war-ravaged Afghanistan, all our neighbours are considerably ahead of India in this list. China, still marginally ahead of India to occupy the slot of the world’s most populous country, is way ahead in the topmost GHI range of 1 to 17. In other words, while the incidence of hunger in China is considered low, it is considered serious in India. India’s child wasting rate, which reflects acute malnutrition among children under five, is the highest in the world. The Modi regime com...

December 6, 2022 will mark the completion of three decades since the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The time bomb that was planted in the wake of India’s independence, with the surreptitious installation of idols at the mosque on the night of 22-23 December 1949, exploded in broad daylight on 6 December 1992 afternoon, when a mob pulled down the mosque in the cheering presence of top BJP leaders. If future historians ever seek to identify a specific moment to trace the rise of communal fascism in today’s India, the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 will undeniably be that moment. India has changed dramatically since that demolition. With every passing day we are now realising ever more acutely that the Ayodhya campaign of the Sangh-BJP camp was not about demolition o...

Posted by: John Phoenix ‘Survival of the Richest’ is the title of the Oxfam Global Inequality Report 2022 released on January 16, 2023. The report, coinciding with the annual global jamboree of the rich and the powerful in the World Economic Forum, gives us a revealing picture of the growing income and wealth inequality, inequality that grew alarmingly during the pandemic and is reinforced constantly by the regressive taxation pattern in the neoliberal era where the poor are taxed heavily while the rich get away with paying very little taxes. This global picture becomes all the more shocking in Modi’s New India where the richest are having a gala carnival. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement had drawn the world’s attention to mounting inequality with the slogan ‘We Are the 99 P...

by the Modi Regimeby Dipankar Bhattacharya Having narrowly retained power in Tripura, the Modi government has launched an all-out offensive against the opposition by using the lethal combination of street power, propaganda and state power that has become the hallmark of this fascist regime. After relatively peaceful elections in Tripura, the Sangh brigade has unleashed a renewed reign of post-poll terror, vendetta and violence in the state, targeting opposition parties, their voters and even the fact-finding team of Left and Congress MPs and MLAs who were on a visit to the terror-stricken state. At the same time, to blunt the oppositional edge of the TIPRA Motha, the regional party which emerged in the elections as the leading non-BJP party in the state assembly, the Modi governmen...