2024

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
Review by Joydip Ghosal
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Bharat Jodo Yatra, Reclaiming India’s Soul
by Pushparaj Deshpande, Ruchira Chaturvedi
HarperCollins Publishers India
2024 | 348 pages
P-ISBN: 978-93-5699-941-1
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Bharat Jodo Yatra, Reclaiming India’s Soul is a comprehensive map of Bharat Jodo Jatra which was an epic nationwide march from September 2022 to January 2023. This definitive book attempts to portray the journey in its entirety. This (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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The Personal Is Political: An Activist’s Memoir
by Aruna Roy
Harpercollins India
2024
Pages: 272
ISBN-10

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
The Bengal famine of 1943 has found expressions in the academic discourse over the years. Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981) and Paul R. Greenough’s Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-44 (Oxford University Press, 1982) are classic books on the subject. Madhusree Mukerjee’s more recent book titled Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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Viewing Indian Polity from the Prism of Manipur: A Compendium on the Continuing Manipur Conflict and Crisis
Compiled by: Dr Syeda Hameed, Clifton D’Rozario
Manak Publications, USA Pages: 119; Price: Rs 400/$ 15
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There cannot be a much better example than Manipur to prove the abject and colossal failure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted and supposedly magical “double engine government”.
Modi’s long silence on (…)

* Editorial - All in the Name of God | Papri Sri Raman
* First session of the 18th Lok Sabha: A Critical Analysis| P. S. Jayaramu
* Che Guevara’s historic visit to India-65 years ago! | Chaman Lal
* Christians and the Political landscape in India | John Dayal
* Northeast India’s battle against drugs | Sajal Nag
* Emergency 1975: Some unknown facts L.S. Herdenia
* The Higher Education of Women in Russia | Sophie Kropotkin

My NRI brother sent me a cryptic message from Boston last week, ‘Hathras-e Hahakar’. Of course, he could not resist the Bengali propensity for assonance. And he did not like my answer. This is India, land of the devout. The country is headed by a godman who claims non-biological birth. The State of Uttar Pradesh is ruled by a ‘saffron-clad yogi’, Adityanath, from the Gorakhpur sect. The 121 deaths in a stampede at a ‘satsang’ are not considered deaths by the administrations here. It is (…)

July 9, 2024
With a brief formal session of Parliament for declaring open the 18th Lok Sabha and the President addressing its first session and the election of Speaker being over, it has become clear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his well-known arrogance is treating everything as it was prior to 2024 election and behaving as if nothing has changed.
Earlier, after getting himself elected as leader of NDA and his own legislature party, Modi got himself sworn in as Prime Minister (…)

July 9 2024
The first session of the 18th Lok Sabha ended a few days ago. Led by the Prime Minister, the Treasury benches were combative from the very beginning, indicating that they had learnt nothing from the drubbing they received by the wise and mature electorate. The Opposition, which after ten long years has an impressive strength in the Lok Sabha, was determined to take on the Government aggressively. I intend making a critical analysis of how the Government and the Opposition (…)

July 2, 2024
The drug menace in India’s northeastern states has major implications for the country’s external and internal security.
When deadly ethnic clashes erupted in Manipur in India’s northeast frontier with Myanmar in May 2023, it was attributed to one group’s demands for recognition as a constitutionally-mandated Scheduled Tribe.
Soon, large swathes of the state were engulfed in the violence. Almost a year after the first killings last summer, the total death count stood at (…)

July 8, 2024
While observing fiftieth year of the imposition of emergency it is not mentioned that the constitution has empowered the Union government to impose three types of emergency if the situation warrants. They are if the country is facing aggression, internal emergency and financial emergency. Then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi in the best of her wisdom must have thought that the country should be put under emergency.
There is no doubt that the country was facing severe (…)