2020

Letter to Readers Mainstream, 20 June 2020 - Lockdown Edition no 13.
Once again blood has been spilt in the High Himalayas, thanks to China’s activities stemming from its expansionist designs against the Indian republic. This happened on the night of June 15th / 16th in the Galwan valley in eastern Ladakh. It resulted in the killing of 20 Indian soldiers including the commanding officer of the patrol party. This was the culmination of the policy pursued by Beijing after the Chinese (…)

What happened in the night of June 14-15 in Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh in which twenty Indian soldiers, including the commanding officer of the patrol party, a colonel, were killed, was the culmination of decades of the wrong China policy pursued by India since the first Chinese aggression of 1962. India-China relations have come to a flashpoint like it never did before Let us take a quick look at the sequence of events since 1962.

The most defining feature of early 21st century is that our world is passing through a survival crisis. There are around a dozen very serious environmental issues which together add up to a serious threat to the basic life-nurturing conditions of our planet. The equally serious threat from weapons of mass destruction is additional to this. The most urgent task before humanity is to do all that is possible, and expand the horizons of possibilities, to protect humanity and all forms of life (…)

Attempts to draw historical parallels from the past do not always work accurately for understanding present situations that may resemble old events. But the record of six years of rule by Narendra Modi (covering his first term from 2014-19, and the present year) recalls an unsavoury phase of our past history, in a rather peculiar way. Narendra Modi seems to be repeating (and compressing within a brief spell of time), the eccentric policies and inhuman brutalities that marked the regime of a (…)

Borrowing from the first famous sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, “it is a fact universally acknowledged” that most aspiring young Indians love and wish to be in America for the following clutch of reasons: the economic opportunities it offers; the strength of its Institutions that respect merit; its adherence to law and order; the cleanness of its habitats; its military might, and its innovative technological predilections. Never mind that most of these attributes (…)

The Communist Party of India (CPI) expresses its deep condolences to the families of officer and jawans, who sacrificed their lives in protecting our borders on the night of 15th June.

The corona pandemic has triggered the sharpest and deepest political and ideological contraction in the history of Communist movement in India. What according to the Communist Manifest was once solid is seen losing its identity and evaporating into air.. The pandemic has completely turned irrelevant the structural concept of Globalisation’ and even Neoliberalism.

Twenty-three years after the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has announced that it is imposing a long-dreaded “national security” law on the territory, effectively criminalizing dissent. Just as stunning as the content of the law is how it will be passed: Instead of moving through Hong Kong’s legislature—which is already rigged in favor of the city’s unpopular pro-Beijing establishment—the law will be enacted unilaterally by China’s top lawmaking body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee. It’s a declaration of both the law’s incontestability and Beijing’s total authority over Hong Kong and its people.

by Zehava Galon
In Israel they don’t like to talk about apartheid. That’s a harsh word. It recalls shameful memories of contemptible cooperation with an unjust regime, and other memories from the times when we were the ones who were not allowed to be part of institutions because of inferior status.
We have a hard time with apartheid – the word, not the policy. It has what they call connotations. But apartheid is the precise word for the annexation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (…)

by Lorenzo Alfano
It’s late at night on Turin’s Via dell’Arcivescovado. A man with a Southern accent shows up at L’Ordine Nuovo’s office, insisting on speaking with the lead editor. For L’Ordine Nuovo is not only the workers’ daily, but also the paper of Antonio Gramsci.
Yet the political climate here in Turin at the start of the 1920s is tense — every night, factory workers do shifts on guard duty to defend the building’s doors. Everyone expects that sooner or later the fascist squads (…)