2015

China’s multifaceted initiative on Pakistan has been received pragmatically by public opinion in India on the watch for what works best. Even the windfall of submarines, as long as it is not technically converted into a platform for directing a nuclear-tipped second strike at India, has not produced knee-jerk alarm, the Defence Minister briefly spelling out a more ambitious schedule. It is now tacitly taken for granted that the various aspects of China’s policies include the Pakistani proxy (…)

Looking at it from any angle, the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Pakistan has been an extraordinary event. To be sure, Pakistan experienced the “Midas touch”. Almost overnight, there is buzz that Pakistan is an overlooked reform story without reform valuations. And this is according to the prestigious London-based Renaissance Capital. But Xi’s visit was not exclusively business-driven, either, since whatever China touches today—even a new bank—also becomes “political”. (…)

This year again, the world is celebrating the First of May as the May Day, a day of labour struggle, solidarity and festival. It would be interesting to learn why the month of May was chosen for the first all-American industrial strike in 1886, which led to the birth of May Day or the International Labour Day.
The month of May has traditionally been a festive one in Western history. May was celebrated as ancient spring festival in the northern hemisphere. In ancient Rome, days in May were (…)

At its 21st Congress, the Communist Party of India-Marxist redoubled its resolve for strengthening the Party, the class and mass organisations and unleashing powerful people’s struggles for forging the Left and Democratic Front, based on a programmatic alternative to
the current policies being pursued by the Indian ruling classes, with the eventual aim of replacing the bourgeois-landlord class rule by the People’s Democratic Front led by the working class. This is the only way that the (…)

by Appukuttan Vallikunnu
The election of Sitaram Yechury as the CPM’s General Secretary without a contest is significant in one aspect. It is a small beginning of that party’s rectification process. First, a victory for those who waged an inner-party struggle against a personalised leadership in the 21st Congress of the CPI-M. A leadership based on personal whims and fancies.
The party is in for an organisational plenum to correct its big organisational mistakes within six months. One (…)

Are you hungry, are you in pain? Come, I’ll feed you the bullet train. Have you no roof ov’r your head? Are you directly under the rain? Come, jump into the bullet train. Are you on foot, pursued apace By rapist, moralist, policeman’s cane? Just one way to cheat them all— Ride away in the bullet train. The bullet train is quick and fast, It leaves behind the ugly things In such rapid tryst with development, You’d think they never did exist. Are you a farmer with noose in hand, (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Outside of religious faith-lines, can the dead be brought to life again? The principal commu-nist grouping in India, the CPI-M, was so systematically destroyed during the Prakash Karat years that it would be difficult to imagine it becoming relevant in Indian politics again. In the larger view of things, this is unfortunate because a country as diverse as India must have a Left-Right-Centre party architecture for democracy to be meaningful. The BJP’s proclaimed policy of a (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Now that the CPI-M’s 21st Congress at Visakhapatnam is over and Sitaram Yechury has been elected as the new General Secretary of the party throwing the dominant party leadership’s plans in jeopardy, we once again remember the CPM patriarch, Jyoti Basu, by reproducing N.C.’s following article which appeared in Mainstream (January 18, 1997) bringing out the issues that were raised by Jyoti Basu’s press interview that was published on Janaury 1, 1997 and came as a (…)

The election of Sitaram Yechury as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist is noteworthy not least because the CPM, with one million members, is the world’s second largest Communist Party (after the Chinese), but also because it comes at a make-or-break moment in the nine decades-long history of the communist movement in India.
Whether and how ably Yechury is able to stem the decline of his crisis-ridden party and rejuvenate and energise it will greatly influence the (…)

Something happened at the 21st Congress of the CPI-M at Visakhapatnam that had never happened in the party Congress of any Communist Party perhaps anywhere in the world and certainly not in India. The name suggested by the outgoing party General Secretary Prakash Karat as his successor, that of S. Ramachandran Pillai, was not acceptable to the majority of the delegates. Their combined pressure on the party leadership was so great that Karat had to ask Ramachandran Pillai to opt out of the (…)