Table of Contents, Mainstream, Sept 20, 2026

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In this issue:

• Are Interstate Migrant Workers in Kerala Really "Guest Workers"? | Jos Chathukulam, A. M. Jose
• Evaluating the Ideas & Ideals of University or Higher Education | Arup Maharatna
• Kerala CPI (M) in Self-Critical, Corrective Mode at Three-Day Conclave | P. Sreekumaran
• Rethinking Indian Agriculture | Deepa Palathingal and Palak Kunwar
• Muthanga After Twenty-Three Years | K.M. Seethi
• Chandsi: A house, a belonging, an emotion | Tarun Basu
• India’s First Metadata case — Part 16 | Gopal Krishna
• We are Apolitical: Simple Truths of a Clever Politics
 | Sanjay Kumar
• Clock time, life-time | John Holloway

DOCUMENTS

• IPSN letter to BRICS summit 2026
• Letter to Minister of Labour over lack of trade union representation in Notification S.O. 3985(E) | AITUC
• Oppose Maharashtra Ban on Radical Literature —PUDR

BOOKS:

• Platform Cooperatives as a Path Beyond Corporate Control: Review of Trebor Scholz’s Own This! | K Sahadevan

IMAGE & SOUND

• Music: Tamikrest - Wainan Adobat
• Video: Growing up during the last days of communism I Lea Ypi

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Editor’s Picks:

• How the SIR Has Targeted Migrant Workers
• Why Nepal floods should worry India
• BRICS Summit: What Rulers Agreed to but People don’t count
• How India opened a consulate in Odessa – and why it took years
• Development economics and the colonial encounter: Informality, caste, and postcolonial capitalist development in India
• Restrained court
• One day the Taliban will need women to be educated’: three sisters on being forced back to Afghanistan
• [Book Review] Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace
• Lawyers of East Africa Unite: Federal Pan-Africanism’s International Court, Dar es Salaam’s Radical Academics, and the Meaning of East African Law after Decolonization
• On Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks: A Socialist Feminist Reconsideration
• Safeguarding healthcare workers from political lobby groups
• PODCAST: How Israel wields international law as a license to kill
• Close to Power, German Far Right Takes Aim at Theaters and Arts

Books of Note:

• The Revolution Falters: The Left in Philippine Politics after 1986 Edited by Patricio Abinales (Cornell University Press, 1996, 182 pages, ISBN-13: 9780877271321

• The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party —Documents, 1919-30 edited by Barbara C Allen (Brill, E-Book ISBN: 9789004248519)

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* (Cover page artwork credits: Sophie Taeuber-Arp ‘Composition with circles with angular arms in lines and planes’, 1930)