2014

As the dust over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections settles down and the stock-taking exercise comes to an end, a question that emerges is if for the first time in republican India the Muslim community accounting for as much as 14.6 per cent of the total population (2011 Census) has begun to lose its relevance to the core identity of the Indian polity.
It would be rash and inadvisable to accept this assessment within a few days of thepublication of the election results, constitution of the new (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Twentyfive years ago, N.C. had left for China when the Tiananmen bloodbath took place on June 4, 1989. Apart from his despatches which appeared in The Times of India on the tragedy that befell that great country at that time, he also wrote this detailed piece which was published in Mainstream (June 17, 1989). This was an enlarged version of an article in The Times of India (June 12, 1989).
The contours of the emerging set-up in China are still very blurred as the (…)

No miracle will ever clean
The memory, bestial and obscene,
Of those who, having fouled their trust,
Grew warped with dread and powerlust—
And ordered fire on the square,
On unarmed people everywhere,
Brave people seeking to be free
Of rottenness, of tyranny.
—Vikram Seth
[This poem was written twentyfive years ago and published in The Times of India on June 6, 1989. It is being reproduced—courtesy The Times of India—in memory of the Tiananmen martyrs.]

• C. Rajeswara Rao, As I Knew Him by A.B. Bardhan
• Com CR: A Fearless Warrior of Indian Revolution by P.K. Balakrishnan

communication
Despite all the recent setbacks suffered by the Left forces, in the general elections and before this, two facts cannot be denied. Firstly, it is the politics of the rights of the poor, the politics of equality and justice, which is the most relevant politics particularly in India’s context. As this is also the defining feature of the Left forces, so these forces remain very relevant. Secondly, keeping in mind the fact that the majority of India’s people cannot even access (…)

As people committed to Centrist politics, the victory of the BJP in the parliamentary elections has saddened many of us. That in no way means that we are making a case for the existing Congress. Not many tears are shed for the defeat of the Congress. The Congress surely deserved what it got, 44 seats in a House of 543, the lowest ever. The party can only reap what it had sown. Not only scams and scandals during the UPA regime, there was also plenty of arrogance besides the total betrayal of (…)

by Amrita Datta
Marx was right—history does repeat itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. The CPI-M’s unsettling performance in the Lok Sabha Election 2009 was tragedy impending; premonition was overt that the party had entered the stage of organisational and ideological crises which, if not addressed immediately, would take it down to the ultimate abyss. However, no change happened, neither in the perspective of the party leaders, nor in their internal party organisation; and the (…)

book review
by Imtiaz Ahmad Ansari
Entangled Yarns: Banaras Weavers and Social Crisis by Vasanthi Raman; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; 2013; pp. X+126 (Hardcover).
The book Entangled Yarns: Banaras Weavers and Social Crisis by Vasanthi Raman deals with the various dimensions of the weaving industry in Banaras and the people associated with it. The book is a sequel to her previous book, titled Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity Among Banaras Weavers, (…)

As India’s new government speeds up the implementation of a selective agenda, several questions need to be raised about the direction and content of new policy decisions and likely decisions. Let’s pick up the newspapers of just one day (May 30) to see the direction of the new government’s decisions. (All news reports cited below are from Delhi editions of newspapers dated May 30.)
‘Sushma, Kerry discuss $500 billion target for trade,’ says a headline in The Hindu. This report said: (…)

At http://www.thehoot.org/web/Stealingphotos/6372-1-1-17-true.html I wrote about how Inquilab and Madhyamam used, without my knowledge and without crediting me, photographs taken by me. Other thieves have crawled out of the wood-work in the eighteen months since then.
In April 2013 I found that HardNews had used a photo I had taken of an ANHAD function, without my knowledge or permission and without naming me on the page. The page where the photo appeared—http://www.hard (…)