2022

by Sheel Bhadra Kumar *
On 23rd May, 2022, during a joint news conference with the Japanese premier Fumio ki shida before the start of the QUAD, the president of the United States, Joe Biden made a statement that created a hyperbolic controversy. In a reply to a question on whether the U.S. will come to the rescue of Taiwan in a situation of invasion by china, the U.S. president answered in affirmative. It set off an angry response from the government in Beijing which vowed ‘’firm action (…)

Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in agrarian Southern Italy, and later moved to the industrial North. Social life in Sardinia had a lasting impact on Gramsci’s political imagination. Togliatti, in his essay “Gramsci sardo” (“Gramsci the Sardinian”), recalled:
“Gramsci made me undertake a minute investigation of the facts of Sardinian social life…we established the principal dates when ‘continental’ capitalism penetrated into Sardinia, and when the island was subjected to the (…)

by Camilo Tamayo Gomez and Gavin Hart **
June 6, 2022
The election of Iván Duque four years ago was a threat for us. But we will continue to follow the peace agreement regardless of who is the next president of Colombia. We are more determined than ever to comply with the peace accords, and this is the reason they want to kill us.
Olmedo Vega spent 35 years as a guerrilla commander during Colombia’s armed conflict – one of the longest the world has ever seen. “The FARC is my (…)

* Social Unrest And National Security | S G Vombatkere
* High Command culture and Democracy in India | P S Jayaramu
* Towards Prudent Fiscal Management in Assam | A Sarma and S Sunder
* Stop talk of purity of races - Concerned Scholars’ Letter to the Ministry of Culture
* Not all the Soviet dead of the World War II were ’Russians’ | Yorgos Mitralias
* Nationalism and Economic Life | Leon Trotsky

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, June 11, 2022
Muslims and other minorities in India have long been repeated targets of intimidation, discrimination, hate speech, and communal violence but this process has seen an acceleration since mid-2014 with a new style of aggressive Hindu Right and the BJP-led government allowing a whole majoritarian ideological and media eco-system to flourish. A daily fare of communal slurs and innuendo have become normalised on TV and in society with officials (…)

Nupur Sharma and Naveen Kumar Jindal reportedly made remarks against Prophet Muhammad. Indian Muslims are outraged. Islamic nations Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and Iran, have taken serious diplomatic objection, and Qatar has reportedly demanded “public apology” from India.
In some of these countries, there are “... protests being lodged with the Indian missions, Indian goods being moved out of the supermarts, hashtags against India’s treatment of (…)

by P S Jayaramu
31st May, 2022
Since direct democracy is not possible to be practised, countries across the world have accepted indirect democracy, be it Parliamentary or Presidential system. The central feature of such a system lies in the importance attached to the role of political parties in the practice of democratic form of government. In India, after much deliberation in the Constituent Assembly, we accepted the Parliamentary system of Government. We have noticed, over the (…)

by Arun Srivastava
With the opposition parties yet to project their candidate who can take on directly Narendra Modi at the 2024 Lok Sabha elections for the office of the prime minister, the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has thrown his cap in the ring. An astute politician, he refrained from making a public announcement, but he made his intentions known to the political fraternity by proclaiming to implement the caste census programme in Bihar.
Modi and his mentor RSS has been (…)

It was pathetic to hear the other day a BJP spokesperson pour venom on the Prophet. Abusing the icon of a religion cannot be accepted in any sensible society. What was said was not just a punch delivered at Islam but at all the good things that Hindu religion stands for. Equally important, the remarks were a slap on the face of what Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly preached.
The Mahatma agonized in his last 200 days. This was when all that he had believed in appeared to be crashing amid wild (…)

Abstract
The debate around the relationship between women, environment and development have come a long way. These debates started, expanded and evolved due to the significant contributions of many ‘feminist environmentalists’ belonging to different disciplines and even outside the realm of disciplinary boundaries. The present article is a tribute to the Indian feminist environmentalists, Vanadana Shiva and Bina Agrawal - one who is closely associated with the WED approach while the other (…)