2021

by A Sunil Dharan
The Finance Minister’s budget speech gave us the impression that she has pulled off the impossible. She has, apparently, presented an expansionary budget with thrust on capital spending and increased expenditure on priority areas like health. At the same time, by projecting a fiscal deficit figure for 2021-22 which is much lower than the revised estimate for 2020-21 she has put the economy on the path of fiscal consolidation. The speech is replete with hyperboles (…)

IMPRESSIONS
More than any other Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi longed for international approbation. He wanted the world to chant Howdy Modi not as part of an organised publicity stunt, but spontaneously with love and reverence. Power in India was important, but just as important was admiration by the world. It was important that the world understood how a tide of popularity carried him to the top and how continuing applause by an ecstatic people is keeping him there. The (…)

For the Mahatma, Farmers Were Saints “If I had my way, our Governor-General would be a peasant, our Prime Minister would be a peasant,” Mahatma Gandhi said at his prayer meeting in New Delhi on January 29, 1948, a day before he was shot dead by a fanatic. Addressing a crowd, he went on: “In my childhood I learnt a poem which says ‘O farmer, you are king, the master of the whole world’.”
Gandhi had been asked a question about the state of (…)

by Arun Srivastava
With the farmers’ movement which so far has been focussed on repealing of the three black laws, acquiring the new dynamics of protest for the restoration of the democracy and protection of the human rights, a nervous prime minister Narendra Modi has personally launched a vitriolic campaign against the campaign and tried to blame the agitators of nursing ill will against him.
So far Modi has been behaving like a person unconcerned of the movement and the plight of the (…)

by Prem Singh
Two achievements of the ongoing peasant movement in opposition to the three agricultural laws which have transformed this movement into nothing sort of exemplary are: carving out a space for democratic resistance; and expanding awareness of the ill effects of capitalism pushed through policies of privatization-corporatization. These two achievements of the peasant movement contain special significance in view of the dictatorial attitude of the present government and in the (…)

Narendra Modi’s ascension to power brought a new phenomenon to India – cow vigilantism. Number of mob lynching incidents took place some resulting in loss of life for the victims who happened to be mostly Muslims. Dalits too took the beating. On the other hand the aggressors hardly ever got punished. In fact, filing of First Information Report against victim or his relatives, in case of his death, became a common occurrence under the Bhartiya Janata Party rule.
As a result of this cow (…)

by Ashutosh Bhardwaj
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THE DEATH SCRIPT:
Dreams and delusions in Naxal country
by Ashutosh Bhardwaj
HarperCollins Publishers India
June 2020 | 280 pages | Rs 599
Available here
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[rouge]EXCERPTS:rouge]
Will you become our intellectual?’
I was surprised.
‘Our biggest weakness is precisely this – that we do not have any intellectuals.’
A forest, somewhere along the Jharkhand–Bihar border. 16 April 2013. The Lawalong block of Chatra district. Some twenty-five (…)

by Nupur Pattanaik
The paper analyses the plight of migrants and talks about the atrocities encountered by the migrant community during the pandemic. The Covid-19 has brought to the spotlight the trials and tribulations faced by women, children, old aged people in the pandemic and how they have been succumbing to exploitation and marginalisation, the need for efficient paradigms and perspectives to make migration safer and needed for the development of the nation. It reflects a need for (…)

by Deputy Deshbhakt
The protesting farmers can tackle barbed wire and steel spikes but cannot cope with 20 ex-IFS officers supporting the farm laws. Farmers cannot read the English statement by experts in drafting papers and non-papers. These farmers produced no IFS officer and thus cannot get help from their kith and kin.
What do the IFS officers have to do with farming? They know the fine distinction between German and Italian wines but cannot distinguish between wheat and rapeseed (…)

by Priyanka Mallick *
Myanmar is again under military rule. After a gap of almost one decade, Myanmar is directly under military control. The State Counsellor of Myanmar and the leader of National League for Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi are detained in the early hours of February 1, 2021, along with other politicians. Min Aung Hlaing, the Commander-in-Chief, took control over the country for one year and declared a state of emergency.
In November 2020 General Election, Aung San Suu (…)