2010

Dear Madam Gandhi,
It did not behove you to rubbish the Bihar Government in your election campaign there by flying in the face of facts. While to play up your party and play down others is both permissible and the done thing in election campaigns, a responsible leader of a responsible national party should not engage in Orwellian untruths and bad-mouth the government it wishes to replace.
The last five years out of the 20 that you have branded as the time of misgovernance in Bihar (…)

Some people compare Obama’s presidentship to President Roosevelt’s in the early 20th century, not Franklin Roosevelt of the Second World War fame, but Theodore before the First World War. But there are serious differences: during Roosevelt’s time finance monopoly in the US had begun to split off from the industrial monopoly capitalism. During Bush’s and Obama’s time, the financial empire has become too distanced from its industrial source, too domineering, necessitating calls for restoring (…)

After the CWG scam the enormity of Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society scandal has struck a body blow to the principal ruling party at the Centre as it is running a coalition government headed by its apointee in Maharashtra and several of its bigwigs, including the CM, are found to be involved in it. But more than the politicians whose image in the public eye has fallen over the years, the fact that besides those associated with politics and the bureaucracy the names of several high-ranking (…)

COMMUNICATION
Arundhati Roy and myself were on the same wavelength in stressing that the government’s policy of allowing factories in fertile farmlands and giving mining leases in forestlands was responsible for alienating the adivasis and farmers, thereby breeding the Maoists. I, too, condemn the fake encounters staged by Army- men and the vandalism by paramilitary forces in Kashmir and demand that both the Union and the State governments seek the people’s forgiveness for whatever heinous (…)

The following is a Background Note prepared on behalf of the CPI-ML (Liberation) for protests it is planning to hold during US President Barack Obama’s visit to India in cooperation with other likeminded organisations. Written by Arindam Sengupta, a leader of the party, it is captioned “US Hands Off India, Hands Off Asia”. It has been published in the CPI-ML (Liberation) weekly news magazine ML Update (October 29-November 1, 2010) from where it is being reproduced with due acknowledgement. (…)

In the Orient, offsprings don’t rebuke parents, even if the latter are at fault—especially in the post-Soviet space where Marxian formalism continues to prevail as political culture. The sort of stern public rebuke bordering on short shrift that Ashgabat administered to Moscow is extraordinary.
But then, Moscow tested Turkmen patience by trying to create confusion about Ashgabat’s policy of positive “neutrality”—building energy bridges to the West alongside its thriving cooperation with (…)

With Afghanistan facing a lot of uncertainty in the foreseeable future, it is imperative for India to begin thinking of how it should meet the contin-gencies arising in its immediate neighbourhood.
Latest reports from Kabul tend to suggest that President Hamid Karzai’s government has in a way begun talking to a section of the Taliban. Although these talks are at a preliminary level, the idea is to promote “reconciliation” to facilitate the induction of what in President Barak Obama’s (…)

Globalisation is often understood as a process that is identical with liberalisation or the opening up of the local and national borders to the global market. But the process as it has been underway is much more complex than this simple or mechanical linkage between globalisation and ‘open door’. Even as there has been very significant liberalisation in recent years, this has been paralleled by the continuation or even the intensification of protectionism in some countries, including the (…)

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS
A strange situation of apparently contra-dictory facets mark the present phase of India’s relationship with the United States of America.
Of late, there is a surfeit of talks about “shared values” ranging from commitment to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. To this has been added in recent months, the government’s new economic policy which plays up private enterprise and underplays public sector—at least that’s how it has been taken in the USA. And (…)

Dear Mr President,
I hope you are doing great. I am delighted to hear that you are coming to India. The last time I saw you at the OSU rally in Ohio battling out against a belligerent Ms Clinton. I have moved back to India since. I witnessed jubilation back home among the Indians in general and the downtrodden in particular seeing the highest office of the most powerful country gained by someone lowest in the social strata—a victory of sorts for the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King (…)