June 2009

The great story of Election-2009 is the Congress’ rejuvenation on an inclusive pluralist-secular platform and the electorate’s emphatic rejection of the BJP’s divisive, communal politics. The Congress has got its second wind and overtaken the BJP by 90 seats and a hefty 10 percentage points in votes. There is overwhelming evidence that the key to its performance lay in its projecting itself as an advocate of the caring state on a broadly Left-of-Centre or social democratic platform through (…)

TRIBUTE
Habib Tanvir, 86, one of the country‘s greatest dramatists, passed away in Bhopal on June 8, 2009. He was instrumental in creating a new language in theatre blending contemporary drama with folk performance and raising folk forms to a level that could attract international attention.
Born Habib Ahmed Khan in Raipur on September 1, 1923, he wrote poems at an early age under the name ‘Tanvir’, a word that never left him. Among his seminal works were Agra Bazar, Charandas Chor, (…)

Genocide is not an appropriate word. In international lexicon it has a definition which would not perhaps apply to large scale slaughter, mayhem, arson, organised rape and other atrocities committed by the ruling party against their political opponents. If you look at the history of the Left Front Government from 1977 onwards, there have been cases of large scale manslaughter beginning with firing on the refugees who settled in the island of Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans in 1978-79. It is (…)

If the various reviews of the results of the just concluded Lok Sabha election are taken into account, then one cannot but conclude that the BJP has more sympathisers among the ‘pundits’ than what the Congress can count on. Lots of reasons for the BJP’s defeat and likely outcomes of it are being proffered—personal attacks against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Varun Gandhi’s vitriolic diatribe against the minority community, internal squabbles and so on. Pro-BJP scribes and commentators are (…)

The news of the rape and murder of two young women in Shopian in Kashmir is deeply shocking. We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms.
We are also deeply disturbed by the reaction of the State. Instead of speaking out against this flagrant violation of human rights, and particularly the right of women to live safely and with dignity, instead of taking speedy and firm steps to bring the perpetrators to book, the State and the new administration first denied the rape of (…)

Ironies hit. On one hand you have women on top slots. President Pratibha Patil, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Women and Child Welfare Minister Krishna Tirath…the list is long. But just about pause here. And see what can happen to the ordinary woman of this land. She could be raped, murdered, tossed and flung about, and yet unaffected we’d sit.
No, we are not crying hoarse even as details are trickling in that the two Kashmiri women of Shopian were indeed (…)

The President of India Pratibha Patel, in her first address to the joint session of Parliament after 15th Lok Sabha election, said that the UPA Government would pass a legislation called the “National Food Security Act” (NFSA) which would entitle, by law, to every family below the the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas to 25 kg of rice or wheat a month at Rs 3 a kg. This is something historic. The NFSA will guarantee that cheap foodgrain is made available to those who can claim it. (…)

More than eleven years have passed since E.M.S. Namboodiripad breathed his last in Thiruvananthapuram on March 19, 1998. Yet it seems as if it was only the other day that one walked into his room in the party office in the Capital for a refreshing conversation as one used to have with him and two of his party colleagues occupying leading positions in the CPI-M as Polit-Bureau members, B.T. Ranadive and M. Basavapunnaiah. They were the three stalwarts of the Indian communist movement, all of (…)

Nineteen Eightyeight will go down in history as the year in which a widely current myth was exploded—the myth that the entire Opposition from the extreme Left to the extreme Right should be united in a single combination if the Congress is to be defeated. It is being increasingly recognised that there cannot be a single Opposition in which the Right and the Left segments are united.
As late as a year ago, the Left was under attack (from the Centrist political leaders and from the (…)

Tributes to E.M.S. Namboodripad
Scholar extraordinary, Comrade EMS would hold his own in intense discussions on ideological, methodological and epistemological issues with close comrades as much as with foremost economists, historians and other social scientists. He would write tracts on both Marxist theory and on emerging aspects of what he described as the National Question. He would, simultaneously, compose documents, in English as well as Malayalam, on contemporary political issues, (…)