2015

by Anamitra Roychowdhury
The clear continuity in economic policies between the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Government is discernible to any observer of the Indian economy. Finance Ministers (FM) of both the governments being deficit hawks walk the path of strict fiscal consolidation. For example, the UPA FM, P. Chidambaram, in his Interim Budget set the target of Fiscal Deficit at 4.1 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (…)

Pioneer of the Pakistani progressive women’s movement and noted Leftist leader Tahira Mazhar Ali passed away in Lahore on March 23, 2015. The editorial in The News International (March 25, 2015) observed: “Daughter of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, landlord and Premier of pre-partition Punjab, and wife of famous Leftist journalist Mazhar Ali Khan, Tahira Mazhar Ali charted out her own path and, some would argue, surpassed the legacy of the two men.” She was among the founders of the Democratic (…)

by Jawed Naqvi
“BY then, I had befriended all the women from the so-called criminal cell,” Tahira Mazhar Ali smiled, her tone toggling between impishness and conspiracy. She was sharing with me one of her many unrecorded stories about the ups and downs in a long revolutionary career. It all came to a slow-motion end on March 23 after a long battle with a stroke. Her work had spanned over seven decades—hectic, chaotic, confusing, rewarding, frustrating and painfully disheartening decades, (…)

MUSINGS
For those survivors who had been witness to the May 1987 massacre at Meerut’s Hashim-pura locality—where 42 innocent Muslim men were picked up from near a mosque and shot dead in cold blood by the Uttar Pradesh PAC cops—these 28 years have been more than painful. Pain and disgust and anger compounding with last week’s news-reports that the 16 accused cops of killing of those young Muslim men have been acquitted by a Delhi court. Yes, acquitted for lack of evidence!
Another (…)

Dr Daya Varma, life-long communist, scientist, activist, dreamer, pharmacologist, professor emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, passed away on March 22, 2015 in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. He was born on August 23, 1929. A former member of the undivided Communist Party of India, he was a founder of the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) and International South Asia Forum, as well as a founding member of CERAS (Centre d’Étude et Ressources d’Asie Sud) and was on (…)

by R.G. Gidadhubli
During the last over two decades since the Soviet break-up, having given up 70 years of communist ideology and adopting the Western system of political democracy and market economy, all the 15 sovereign and independent states of the former USSR have been regularly holding presidential elections. On March 30, 2015, the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan declared the result of its presidential election held on March 26, according to which Islam Karimov was declared elected (…)

We are to believe that the ass is actually a horse because Modi and his people choose to call it that.
In the months since Narendra Damodardas Modi campaigned for the general election and then became the Prime Minister, there has been a barrage of claims and statements from him and his team which a young friend describes as an enormous, unceasing release of gas. If the analogy is taken further, the object of the flatulence seems to be to so envelop us in a foul miasma as to render us (…)

EDITORIAL
While the Aam Aadmi Party’s squabbles have snowballed with the summary expulsion of two of its founder-members—Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan—and some other leading figures in the party, like Anand Kumar and Ajit Jha, also meeting a similar fate, the organisation’s internal Lokpal Admiral L. Ramdas (Retd) too was suddenly removed from his post on March 29. In a dignified letter to the party the same evening, Admiral Ramdas wrote:
It is with grreat surprise and sadness that (…)

The Indian Government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national Capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s senior Ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent. Civil rights groups have recorded 168 incidents of targeted violence against the (…)

by Christoph Pauly
With broad public resistance and a Euro-pean Parliament majority against it, EU officials are rethinking their positions on the proposed free-trade agreement with Washington. Many fear investor protection rules will wreak havoc on national laws.
When Bernd Lange talks about the advantages of a free trade agreement with the US, he often cites the example of the VW bus. The hippy favourite has been the target of a 25 per cent tariff since 1964, a punitive move after the (…)