2022

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, March 12, 2022
The just-concluded state assembly elections of February March 2022 in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, and Goa have forcefully demonstrated again the overwhelming dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a political force in India. In all four states it has been re-elected successfully for a second term. Unfortunately, since 2014 many in democratic and left circles have, repeatedly failed to realise that the party is over; (…)

There is a grassroots saying in the bundocks of North India, criminally casteist in its original Hindi, which could be translated into politically correct English as “Don’t write anyone off till their death anniversary has been observed.”
It will, therefore, be too early to write the obituary of either the Indian National Congress or the Bahujan Samaj Party which are the two well-known political parties which have been the worst losers from more than one state in the just concluded (…)

(The below tribute by Prabhat Patnaik was received by us via multiple sources including WhatsApp groups and via public listserves on the evening on March 10, but there was no publication source attributed. Just prior to publication we have discovered that the tribute has been published by The Hindu. We are proceeding to publish this tribute in public interest and for non-commercial use)
Professor Aijaz Ahmad who passed away on March 9, 2022, was a truly outstanding Marxist thinker of our (…)

I. Background
This note is a product of our effort to investigate the “Kerala illegal adoption case” where a new-born infant was forcibly snatched and handed over to an adoption agency by the mother’s family, against the mother’s will and without her consent. When all her attempts to recover the child through appeals to the authorities failed, the mother Anupama Chandran started a fast outside the State Secretariat and took her story to the media. Activists and women’s groups joined her (…)

March 6, 2022 by Nadra Huma Quraishi On March 8, women around the world mark a day they call their own — International Women’s Day, highlighting achievements and dialoguing about issues still unresolved. The Women’s Day theme this year is #BreakTheBias, underscoring the idea that it is not enough to acknowledge the existence of bias. Action is necessary to achieve equality.
While the rest of the world is devising strategies to improve conditions for women, Pakistani women face the (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Winston Churchill hated India. Which was natural because his mind was mutilated by imperialism, so he couldn’t understand why the stupid Indians agitated for independence.
Rudyard Kipling had no such problem. Being a poet, he took a philosophical view of the world and agreed that "East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet." If that reality had been accepted by both East and West, a great deal of the world’s problems could have been avoided. (…)

by K N Ninan *
While Indians await the results of the ongoing assembly elections to gauge which way the wind is blowing in the country, either for or against the ruling BJP, both BJP and opposition leaders have started manoeuvring in preparation for the 2024 general elections in the country. While the Modi government talks of ‘Amrit Kaal’, opposition leaders such as Mamata Banerjee and K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) have taken the initiative to form an anti-BJP front to take on the ruling BJP (…)

Very significant gains were achieved by construction workers of India in the form of two laws enacted in 1996 for their social security and welfare. Then for over two decades another phase of struggle had to continue for their implementation in the right spirit. By the year 2018 again there were significant successes in the form of decisions of Supreme Court and High Courts for proper implementation. Just when it appeared that the promising laws and the significant gains they could bring to (…)

The assembly elections of five, which lasted for about a month, are going to end. Only last phase of the elections is left in Uttar Pradesh to be held on March 7. Much of the debate during the elections was lost to accusations and counter-accusations between the parties and leaders. In the debate on election issues that appeared in newspapers, magazines, online, social media and TV channels, no discussions were heard on the New Education Policy (NEP). I personally inquired and also asked (…)

by Amitanshu Verma *
Abstract
In the ongoing Uttar Pradesh assembly elections the focus is yet again on ‘criminal politicians.’ Almost every other speech teems with invocation of words like mafia, bahubali and tamancha-wadi. As the incumbent BJP goes to polls it highlights controlling the mafia politicians, as one of its prime achievements in the last five years. This essay provides a brief historical sketch of the rise of the figure of ‘criminal politician’ and the discourse of (…)