2021

How Nixon and Kissinger failed to respond to urgent need for course-correction from their own senior diplomats
This year events relating to the liberation of Bangladesh have been recalled time and again as Bangladesh has completed 50 years as a nation. On March 26 Bangladesh celebrated its 50th freedom day as the first announcement of its freedom was made on this date in 1971. However this was followed by one of the worst crackdowns of post war period. Effective freedom came when the (…)

by Murzban Jal
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Dear Mr. Kanhaiya Kumar
In normal times one could greet you as “comrade Kanhaiya Kumar” for this is what many people thought you to be when you captured the imagination of the nation a few years back when the slogans of “Jai Bhim, Lal Salaam” along with the cry of freedom resonated. You then (at least in popular imagination) stood for resistance against not only (…)

In his seminal book, On Ethics and Economics (Blackwell Publishing, 1987), Amartya Sen argued: “It is, in fact, arguable that economics has had two rather different origins, both related to politics, but relatedin rather different ways, concerned respectively with ‘ethics’, on the one hand, and with what may be called ‘engineering’, on the other”. Regarding the ‘engineering’ approach, Sen observed: “This approach is characterized by being concerned with primarily logistic issues rather than (…)

Our country has a long history of gross abuse of power and deprivation of human rights in the context of the laws relating to sedition, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. In order to provide legal sanctity to their repressive measures, successive governments in India have armed themselves with various so called ‘anti- terrorism’ laws, each being more draconian than the previous one.
These laws also stand out for the remarkable (…)

All India Federation of University and College Teachers Organisations (AIFUCTO)
PRESS - RELEASE: PATNA
17.12.2021
AIFUCTO THREATENS ALL INDIA PROTEST PROGRAM ON PUNJAB TEACHERS DEMAND FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 0F 7th REVISED UGC SCALES OF PAY:
All India Federation of University and College Teachers Organization (AIFUCTO) seriously considering an All India Protest Program in support of Punjab University and College Teachers demand on (…)

BOOK REVIEW
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Branded in History: Fresh Marketing Lessons from Vintage Brands
by Ramya Ramamurthy
Hachette India
Pages: 309; Price: Rs 499
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9388322681 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9388322683
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Did you know that Sunlight soap is as old as the Indian National Congress? The Lever Brothers in the UK made the first ‘vegetarian soap’ by combining vegetable or palm oil with glycerine to create Sunlight in 1885. After all, Indians were averse to imported soaps with animal (…)

Reviewed by Vsevolod Kritskiy (University of Amsterdam) __0__ Comintern Aesthetics
Amelia M. Glaser, Steven S. Lee, eds.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2020 Illustrations. xxi + 563 pp. $95.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-0465-6 __0__
In Comintern Aesthetics, editors Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee include sixteen diverse chapters that seek to “remap world literature and culture from the perspective of world communism” (p. 3). In a timely and welcome collection, the contributing (…)

by James M. Dorsey *
The crown jewel of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly looks like a powder keg that has exploded.
Mass protests have for the past month swept Gwadar, a Chinese-dominated Pakistani port city 90 kilometres from the border with Iran that has long been plagued by intermittent protests and Baloch nationalist attacks on Chinese nationals and targets.
Making things worse from China’s perspective, a local cleric, a member of Pakistan’s oldest Islamist (…)

(In the absence of practically no coverage on the issue in the Media in India we are carrying the below report from the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail)
by James Griffiths
December 13, 2021
Media tycoon Jimmy Lai and seven other Hong Kong pro-democracy activists have been sentenced to as many as 14 months in prison for their roles in a banned vigil held last year for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
A candlelit ceremony had been held every June 4 until 2020, when (…)

Instead of focusing on changes that would ease pandemic suffering, left-wing groups have joined hysterical protests that boost conspiracy theorists