2016

DOCUMENT
• Release JNU students Omar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya immediately!!
• Release Delhi University Professors S.A.R. Geelani and G.N. Saibaba immediately!!
• Abolish Capital Punishment! Abolish the colonial ‘Sedition Act’!
• Justice for Rohith Vemula and enactment of the Rohith Act!!
• Complete withdrawal of Army from Kashmir, North-Eastern States and Chhattisgarh!!
• Justice for Soni Sori! Stop assaults on journalists, activists and NGOs in Chhattisgarh!
Indian (…)

The Aadhaar Bill, 2016
The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 (“Aadhaar Bill”, for short) was passed in the Lok Sabha on March 11, 2016, as a money bill, a strategem clearly meant to prevent delay in the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP does not command a majority.
Leaving aside the questionable strategem, the Aadhaar Bill leaves much to be desired, especially considering its troubled “history” ever since the beginning of the Aadhaar (…)

Legendary freedom fighter and martyr Bhagat Singh’s birth centenary was observed on September 28, 2007. On the occasion of the eightyfifth anniversary of his martyrdom, we are reproducing, with due acknowledgement, the following article (published earlier in Countercurrents.org) in homage to the outstanding revolutionary hero’s abiding memory. He was executed along with Sukhdev and Rajguru in Lahore on March 23, 1931. He was and remains to this day a source of inspiration for our youth. In (…)

by Sujit Lahiry
The verdict in the Bihar Assembly elections in 2015 has some politically significant impli-cations not only for regional politics, but also for national politics. The Grand Alliance won 178 seats — out of which JD (U) got 71 seats, RJD got 80 seats and Congress got 27 seats. Despite a high-voltage, high-octane poll campaign by the BJP, the Grand Alliance won the elections by a thumping majority and was able to secure a three-fourths majority in the Bihar Assembly. This (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Indian budgets are presented on the last day of February so that Parliament and the government will have all of March to discuss and finetune it before a new financial year begins on April 1. (Another British era tradition stipulated that budgets be presented in the evening so that stock markets would be closed and adventurous traders could do no mischief. Yashwant Sinha changed that practice by presenting his budgets at noon. The skies didn’t fall.)
There are three features (…)

BOOK REVIEW
A Revolutionary History of Interwar India—Violence, Image, Voice and Text by Kama Maclean; Hurst and Company, London; First edition: 2015; 342 pages; price not mentioned.
One would be rather surprised to know the increasing interest in the study of the Bhagat Singh phenomenon in the Western academia lately, perhaps more than Indian academia taking interest in the subject!
Not only the author of the present book, Dr Kama Maclean, who is an Australian and an Associate (…)

I believe that a head of state should not publish his memoirs while in office. Political parties are reluctant to criticise him because he is the constitutional head, as much theirs as that of those who elected him. Pranab Mukherjee has violated the demand of office by publishing his memoirs when he is still the President of India.
Before reading his autobiography, I imagined that Mukherjee would explain how he was wrong in becoming Sanjay Gandhi’s Man Friday. Prime Minister Indira (…)

While India’s first GM crop, Bt cotton, has proved to be risky and hazardous in many ways, there was at least a saving grace that the introduction of the highly hazardous GM technology was confined so far to non-food crops. But more recently various government agencies have moved rapidly in the direction of introducing GM food crops as well. While a final decision on this is still awaited, it is clear that in various ways the path for introduction of GM food crops is being cleared. If the (…)

Article 19 (g) of the Constitution of India confers on every citizen of India the fundamental right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. By implication, it would include the right to appropriate or purchase and/or sell products, according to one’s own volition and convenience, at a rate which is considered just, fair and equitable without any element of deceit and guard, manipulation, coercion or regimentation. To the extent such transaction carried (…)

Never was a more truthful thing
Writ than “those that have
Shall get”; thus when pirate
Is let loot the realm and best
“Investigating agencies”, this
Is done in the “national interest”.
Just as recoveries of pittance
Made from farmer on edge
Of despair are also made
In the very same “national interest”.
If the labouring hordes who
Make our wealth are not
Squeezed, how may the nation
To fat men be leased?
Good governance cannot mean
Justice to all; it means how (…)