2017

The following is the statement issued by the Socialist Party (India)’s President, Dr Prem Singh, on July 18, 2017 on the latest India-China border dispute.
The aggressive Kashmir policy of the Modi Government has led to the present conflict with China. China is trying to create a siege around India. The Chinese policy experts are creating an impression through China’s media that the Chinese Army can enter Azad Kashmir and confront India just as India has entered Bhutan and challenged (…)

The following is a poem composed as a tribute to Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Laureate and political prisoner who recently passed away in Chinese custody.
An empty chair!
His presence was denied
to receive the award;
the message of peace forbidden
as a brand of the West.
The dragon raised the wall,
spewing yellow fire,
stifling the voice of dissent
within the prison cell.
The outside world was shut off.
Days dawned; nights deepened.
Afflicted with a disease,
he (…)

EDITORIAL
The incident in the evening of last Monday (July 10) at Batengoo on the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway in South Kashmir—that resulted in the killing of seven Amarnath pilgrims, including five women, while 15 were injured when militants attacked a bus carrying 56 passengers—has jolted not just the J&K polity but the country at large.
What did this attack signify? As The Indian Express editorially pointed out, the Amarnath shrine ”has been a powerful symbol of the syncretic (…)

by Sankar Ray
Revered and erudite journalist Sunanda Kishore Datta-Ray, author of Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, has very succinctly stated about the mounting tension in the Dokolam plateau: “Strictly speaking, India is not involved in today’s dispute over the Dokolam plateau where the Chinese are said to claim 269 sq km of Bhutanese territory. But Jawaharlal Nehru’s warning in the Lok Sabha in 1959, ‘We have publicly, and rightly, undertaken certain responsibilities for the defence (…)

Widespread communal violence broke out in Basirhat and its surrounding areas on July 4. Apparently, it was a ‘spontaneous’ outburst of Muslim anger against a highly objectionable and provocative Facebook post by a boy in his teens. The boy, a resident of Baduria, some fifteen kms from Basirhat town in the North 24-Parganas district of West Bengal, is known to be a member of an organisation that subscribes to the Hindutva ideology. The whole area is close to the Bangladesh border and (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Important events are graduated into landmarks in History as they are invested with hindsight. Perhaps it would be premature to call an event a landmark on the very morrow of its happening. By this criterion, the meeting of the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan at Islamabad on June 19-23, 1997 has a significance which needs to be taken into account.
For years at a stretch, there was no formal meeting at the official level to decide on the agenda for a (…)

As the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe Government is short of a few months to roll on to its third year in office, Sri Lanka’s declining economy and unresolved political issues have served to erode much of the sheen that was generated in January 2015 with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s surprise defeat and the ushering in of a new-look and promising government.
However, in this gathering gloom came a sudden and welcome whiff of fresh air with President Maithripala Sirisena affirming in the (…)

by A.V.V.S.K. Rao
The Greater the Wealth, the Thicker will be Dirt. — J.K. Galbraith, (Harvard, USA)
Introduction
The black money created ‘Parallel Economy’ poses a serious threat to stability and growth of the real (product) economy. Since the 1990s clandestine deals have been growing in volume and complexity at an alarming rate. Besides, black incomes are accentuating the inequalities of income and distributable wealth and breeding a new class of rich/crony capitalism in an economy (…)

Government officers after retirement take to sanyas, but some courageous ones have spoken against the intolerant society that India is becoming. In their open letter they say: “It appears there is a growing religious intolerance that is aimed primarily at Muslims.”
Apparently, there has been no discussion or mention about the sentiments of this letter. The BJP, which sets the tone of society, probably did not want any discussion and let the matter die as it has. Yet, the fact remains that (…)

by R.G. Gidadhubli
The summit of G-20 nations in Hamburg gave an opportunity for the long awaited meeting between the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the US President, Donald Trump, on July 7, 2017. There are valid speculations as to how far this meeting will bring about real improve-ment in strained relations between Russia and the USA even as European analyst Mike Eckel has opined that it was historic. This is partly because it became big news when after a routine handshake, the (…)