2020

By Azim Premji
Sixteen young men were mowed down by a train. The details are still being investigated. But we do know the basic truth. Like millions of others who lost their livelihood, they were starving. So, they decided to walk a few hundred kilometres to their homes and slept on the tracks assuming no trains would run, since it was the lockdown. Some kind of a lockdown was necessary to tackle the pandemic, but these deaths are an unforgiveable tragedy.
I don’t use the word (…)

Is it a few hours, days or maybe a week into the harshest lockdown in the world? No, it is 50 days. The tide of workers which started walking home from day one, fully sure that it would not count for govts, fully sure that sure starvation and penury was guaranteed in the days ahead, has turned into a torrent and goes on and on. How is that? Considering that the highest Court was assured that Govt had provided food and shelter, considering that govts are considerably providing transport, why (…)

May 10, 2020
The two-hour stopover in Delhi on May 7 by the US special representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, accompanied by the White House official in charge of South Asia Lisa Curtis, raises eyebrows. The Indian media reported that Khalilzad came all the way to render the advice that India should get involved in the “internal processes” in Afghanistan, and, secondly, directly engage with the Taliban. The American side has not issued any statement on Khalilzad’s mission. A (…)

by Andrey Kortunov
Mao Zedong once summed up his philosophy on foreign policy with the following metaphor, "a wise monkey sitting on top of the mountain to watch the two tigers fight in the valley below.” The tigers in the Great Helmsman’s formulation were, of course, Moscow and Washington, and Beijing was the wise monkey. And China was able to play the role of “wise monkey” in its foreign affairs quite successfully for a number of years, skillfully manoeuvring in the background of the (…)

It was May, 1995, exactly 25 years ago. Hari Vasudevan (Calcutta University), Purabi Roy (Jadavpur University) and I myself (Calcutta University) were in Moscow for two months, working as a team sent by The Asiatic Society, Calcutta in connection with a project of collection of documents from the newly opened Soviet archives on Indo-Russian Relations : 1917-1947. This project was the result of a Protocol signed between The Asiatic Society, Calcutta and Moscow’s Institute of Oriental (…)

by Naren Singh Rao
Prof. Yogendra Singh, one of the iconic Indian sociologists and founder of Sociology department at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, passed away on May 9. He was 87.
Prof. Singh was one of those rare, visionary sociologists who toiled untiringly to establish sociology as a stand-alone, respectable discipline within the realm of Indian social sciences. His social imagination and understanding was deeply imbued in pure sociology, in contrast to several of his (…)

The Editors Guild of India notes with concern a growing pattern of misuse of criminal laws to intimidate journalists in different parts of the country

The Business Standard (Dhaka), 14 May, 2020
by Mir Mohammad Jasim
Bangladesh has lost one of its most respected scholars, pre-eminent academic and luminary in the passing of National Professor Anisuzzaman He was one of Bangladesh’s brightest stars, through thick and thin, whose light shone on many. Eminent educator, writer, national professor, and luminary Anisuzzaman passed away on Thursday. The 83-year-old, who was suffering from several complications, breathed his last around (…)

DOCUMENT
Socialist Party (India)
PRESS RELEASE | 12 May 2020
The government has announced that railway services on several routes will be resumed on May 12. However, these trains will have only AC coaches, and the train fares will be equal to those of the elite Rajdhani trains. This appears to be a highly discriminatory decision. It will allow a very small section of rich people to start travelling around the country while completely excluding the vast majority of the population, who (…)

13.05.2020/SGV
Viruses
Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 which causes Covid-19 is just one of the more recent viruses in our environment, and it is here to stay [“One in 3 recover, time to learn to live with virus, says govt”; Deccan Herald; 09.05.2020, p.1]. It will add one more virus to the billions of viruses to which human bodies are already host.
The problem faced by humanity is not so much about Covid-19 per se, or about virus-caused disease or death, but more about their aggravating (…)