2021

* Corona-capitalism: Reverse the Reset [Part B] | Kobad Ghandy
* Re-masculinizing Labour in Bangladesh’s Ready-Made Garment industry | Strumpell & Ashraf
* Comrade - Dalit poem from 1978 translated by Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar
* Modi’s Monetisation Plan Mortgaging Public Wealth to Big Business | C P Chandrasekhar
* Indian Muslims must reject the ‘Islamic Emirate’ in Afghanistan: Statement from Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Aug 28, 2021
Over the past two weeks, people around the world have been transfixed watching the horrific images of thousands of Afghans queuing up to access the Kabul Airport and hopeful of being evacuated out to escape life under a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. (An estimated hundred thousand people have already been evacuated by the Americans & other western powers) These people seeking haven abroad may only represent a small fraction of Afghan society (…)

This article seeks to give a reply to the World Economic Forum’s CEO, Klaus Schwab’s recent book: Covid-19: The Great Reset, and his dystopian agenda. The article is divided into five parts:
Coronacapitalism: Reverse the Reset
[PART A]
(1) The Great Recession & The rise of China (i) Post WWII: Cycles of Crises (ii) Enter the Dragon (iii) Contention & Collusion
(2) Pandemic and Lockdown (i) Eve of lockdown (ii) Impact of Lockdown - International (iii) (…)

by Christian Strümpell & Hasan Ashraf *
Bangladesh’s growth into one of the world’s major producers of ready-made garments, or RMG, over the last forty years is well-known. Starting out with 9 RMG factories in 1978, their numbers grew to 598 in 1985, to 2,353 in 1996, and to more than 4,500 factories in late 2019, a few months before the global Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, the industry’s turnover grew from 131.48 million USD in 1985 to 2.55 billion USD and to 33.07 billion USD in 2019, (…)

by Prof. C P Chandrasekhar
August 26, 2021
Camouflaged In jargon that speaks of ‘monetisation of de-risked assets’, the BJP-led NDA government has announced its plan to sell out India’s public sector. In that plan, assets ranging from roads, ports, airports and railway track and stations, through fuel pipelines, telecom towers, optical fibre cabling, warehouses, and stadia, are to be handed over to big private investors in return for upfront or staggered payments of around Rs 6 lakh (…)

The number of domestic workers has been increasing rapidly in India, but the COVID restrictions led to a sudden reduction in these work opprtunities and also increased the economic problems of domestic workers greatly.
Domestic workers in India constitute a highly vulnerable section of workers In India. An overwhelming majority of them are women and girls. A significant number of them are single mothers. A majority of them are migrants. Hence from various points of view domestic workers (…)

by Ram Puniyani
India’s partition has been one of the major tragedies of the twentieth Century World. The loss of lives and the mass migrations have very few equivalent tragedies in the World. The wounds of the tragedy are not totally healed but people have engaged with the changed dynamics of nationalism. In the middle of all the gnawing problems which India is facing; Mr. Narendra Modi declared that 14th August, a day prior to Independence Day, will be observed as ‘Partition Horrors (…)

For the second time in twenty years the dreaded Islamist fundamentalist force, the Taliban, have returned to power, the first time in 1994-96 by waging war against the Afghanistan state then run by the Burhanuddin Rabbani-Ahmad Shah Massoud government and this time, in the August of 2021 through a machivellian combination of warfare and diplomacy.
Therefore, they have begun their second journey to power in a significantly different manner. Their leaders and spokesmen are talking in (…)

The nation called Afghanistan has never been allowed to be a sovereign state. It has always been an occupied country, first by the erstwhile USSR, then by the U.S. and the terrorists created by the U.S. and now by the Taliban (which also is the creation of the U.S.). Mullah Mohammed Omar who created Taliban was a mujahideen fighter and it was mainly the U.S. which generously funded and provided arms and ammunition to the mujahideen for the proxy war against the USSR. When the Taliban (…)

IMPRESIONS
"Hinduism will be finished in another century," says Abhijit Iyer Mitra, an academic. That of course is nonsense. If there is one religion in the world that will never be "finished," it is Hinduism. The most important reason is that Hinduism is not just a religion. It is a philosophy, an attitude to life. It is a way of putting oneself in perspective vis a vis the world. It can be "finished" only when "life" is finished, when "philosophy" is finished.
Why would (…)