2022

by Supriy Ranjan and Pankaj Kumar *
Mandal politics signified a paradigmatic shift in Indian politics. It completely changed the physicality as well as the language of doing politics. The Parliament and state assemblies, for the first time, mirrored cleavages and antagonisms of Indian society. It is in this sense that Mandal politics signified the deepening of democracy in India. While much analysis has focused on the representational democratisation that this politics brought in. The (…)

07 March 2022
by Mike Davis
Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheiks, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds. What I find most remarkable about these strange days ­– as thermobaric bombs melt shopping malls and fires rage in nuclear reactors – is the inability of our supermen to validate their power in any plausible narrative of the near future.
By (…)

5 Mar 2022
Oksana Dutchak is a researcher based in Ukraine and an activist of E.A.S.T. – Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. She tells about the current ever-changing situation in Ukraine and local attempts of self-organization to cope with the war. The question of how to create a transnational politics of peace has no easy answer. Continuing to mobilize and communicate across the borders is crucial but it should go hand in hand with radically rethinking the transnational itself. (…)

War and the Deep State
Russia’s military attack on Ukraine starting 24 February 2022, is war. Whether or not countries are actually involved in war, war is always justified by one or more parties to the conflict, and condemned as unjustified by one or more parties.
Both sides of the conflict and opinion have their arguments and “facts”, which are easily manufactured using fake news and deep-fake videos. Thus, long before the first physical casualty in fighting, the first casualty in war (…)

There are two narratives about the Russia-Ukraine war in circulation. One is projecting invading Russia as the villain and demanding immediate cessation of hostilities. Second is holding United States foreign policy responsible for this which even after the cold war got over in 1991 was unnecessarily trying to provoke Russia by trying to expand North Atlantic Treaty Organisation making the new states which emerged from Union of Soviet Socialist Republic as its members. Russia felt insecure (…)

As a teacher, I have engaged primarily with university students. Yet, I have always felt that my participation in what we regard as ‘higher education’ should not be separated from school education. I can’t see myself as just a university intellectual—burdened with a heavy baggage of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’, and separated from children, or the way they grow up as learners in families and schools. There are three reasons for my intense urge to engage with young children. First, I believe (…)

by Aravind *
The right-wing nationalism that we see today is confined to labelling certain progressive forces as anti-nationals and urban naxals. As Dr Ambedkar said “Caste kills the public spirit” and precludes the emergence of the notion of nation. Any project of nationalism therefore has to be preceded by strongly advocating the agenda of ‘Annihilation of Caste’. The Post-Ambedkarite movement has thrown up a gamut of ways to achieve this by treading more or less the same path. But one (…)

by Siby K. Joseph
Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan, Wardha, Maharashtra in association with Gandhian Collective India and Faculty of Gandhian Studies, Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad had organized a National Webinar on the theme Gandhi and Panchayati Raj System in Present Context: Conundrum and Possibilities on February 13, 2022. Dr. Siby K. Joseph, Director, Sri Jamnalal Bajaj Memorial Library and Research Centre, Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan, Wardha gave a brief introduction about the Webinar and (…)

The Corporate Regulator, SEBI, has announced deferment of its decision to split the post of MD and Chairman with effect from March 31, 2022, the date extended date by two years in 2020.
Sebi had announced in 2018, on the suggestions of the Uday Kotak Committee on Corporate Governance to amend provisions of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) Regulations, 2015. As per the recommendations:
a). positions of the chairman and managing director (MD/CEO) or chief (…)

Understanding politics and political theory is a contested terrain. Rajeev Bhargava’s thought-provoking book, What is PoliticalTheory and Why do We Need it? (Oxford University Press, 2010), addressed such contentious questions.He stated in the Preface of the book: “Sound moral and ethical judgements are dependent less on classroom lessons and more on rich lived experience”. While clarifying his own position on theorization of politics, Bhargava argued: “There is wealth of lived experience in (…)