2020

by Katha Pollitt
November 13, 2020
From the courts to the border to the meaning of truth, damage has been done.
My Uncle Harry has seen it all, and he has the years to prove it: He turned 100 on November 1. (In case you were wondering, he attributes his longevity to family, love, curiosity, and ice cream every day.) When Donald Trump was elected, Uncle Harry predicted that the next four years would be awful but there would be only two things that couldn’t be undone even if the (…)

Table of Contents, Mainstream, Nov 14, 2020 Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Nov 14 Lessons and Hopes From Bihar Election | Vijay Kumar 2020 Bihar State Assembly Election Raises Hope of Combating Horror | Sankar Ray Document: Bihar Assembly Elections Nov 2020 Results - Statement by Left Parties Trump retrofits history, takes Pinochet route | M K Bhadrakumar Trump’s Heavy Footprints on History | T J S George Biden’s victory a sign of warning for Narendra Modi | Arun Srivastava
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Letter to the readers, Mainstream, Nov 14
The just-concluded November 2020 State Assembly elections in Bihar were very closely contested. In a large number of constituencies, the margin between the winners and losers was below 500 votes. The Opposition alliance of social democratic and Left parties performed quite well but could not get another 15-20 seats they had expected, which would have led them to victory. The final tally gave the ruling NDA alliance in Bihar 125 seats and the (…)

by Vijay Kumar *
The results in Bihar Assembly Election could be summed up in one sentence. The juggernaut of toxic Moditva is rolling, nay, kicking, but could be countered through class solidarity by putting the issue of economic justice on the forefront.
The whole credit for NDA success attributed to P.M. Modi masks the massive investment made by the BJP. The BJP had been hyperactive with a virtual rally from September onwards and continued till the end, whereas there was no (…)

by Sankar Ray
The Mahagathbandhan (MGB) model in the Bihar state assembly elections has proved to be an entirely new experiment paving the way for an alternative to the rightwing Hindutva fascism. that aims at the destruction of the parliamentary democratic order. The MGB reminds one of Georgi Mikhaylovich Dimitrov, Secretary-General of Communist International – his simple and unambiguous slogan to halt Fascism and Nazism of Popular Front in Europe. Dimitrov put forward only one condition (…)

Press Statement
Date: November 11, 2020
The three Left Parties - Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) - have issued the following statement:
Hailing Bihar Electorate
The Left Parties congratulate the electorate of Bihar for their support to the Mahagathbandhan, including the candidates of the Left parties, which contributed to the Mahagathbandhan putting up a spirited contest in the election against the ruling (…)

November 11, 2020
The instances of cabinet officials being fired have become such a whimsical affair in the Donald Trump presidency that novelty has worn off. Yet, in the dismissal of defence secretary Mark Esper on Monday, Trump probably acted per a script.
Curiously, the firing of Esper coincided with a memo from the US Attorney-General William Barr authorising federal prosecutors to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the Nov 3 presidential race are (…)

IMPRESSIONS For America’s sake, and for the world’s sake, it was important that Donald Trump should not win a second term as President. That he came close to it points to the power of a disturbing element in American life — racism. Ultimately racism counts in America. In all white countries, there are blacks. But American blacks represent something distinctly American. This relates to the prominent role blacks played as slaves in American history. (…)

by Arun Srivastava
In electing Biden, the American people have replaced a real estate developer and a self-seeker reality TV actor with a veteran and pragmatic politician with more than 50 years in public life. After four years of despotic rule the Americans must be feeling relieved. They yearned for getting rid of this comic and regressive administration is clearly manifest in unprecedented huge turnout of the voters. Their coming out in large number was simply a repudiation of a (…)

“There is no man, who has not something hateful in him---no man who has not some of the wild beasts in him. But there are few who will honestly tell us how they manage their wild beast.” —Voltaire
Part-I
The role of Lord William Bentinck (14 September 1774 – 17 June 1839) for restructuring the socio-cultural foundation of the Hindus “debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft” [1] can rarely be exaggerated. His bold move to ban and abolish the cruel practice of (…)