2024

A Sri Lankan Tamil party that has paid a heavy price for consistently opposing Tamil Tiger politics has pledged to work with all communities in the island nation while resisting racists and supremacists from all sections of society.
The Social Democratic Party of Tamils (SDPT), the successor to the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (ERPLF), has called for a full and proper implementation of the India-backed 13th amendment to the constitution that devolves powers to all (…)

08 Feb 2024
Dear Rehman,
I am hugely moved by your letter about our shared Bangladesh. It also made me think about our student days, when we had such dreams about a future Bengal and hoped that our anticipations and highest expectations would someday come true.
You were living mostly in Kolkata in those days, and I was, in contrast, mostly in Dhaka, on the other side of the east-west divide.
The familiar trains that left Dhaka railway station, which my freedom fighter cousins once (…)

I have been watching the protest of students at Columbia University, and its spread over other University campuses in US and even in other countries against the Israel attack on Gaza civilians and humongous violation of human rights with sad emotion and unrelieved anguish. As recently as in the last week of March, I was invited to participate in a symposium on the American-Indian Constitution, organized by the Law School of Columbia University. I enjoyed the warm hospitality of faculty and (…)

May 07, 2024
I was proud to organize with Standing Together at UCLA last Wednesday morning (this was the morning after the heinous assault by counter-protestors, but before the encampment was shut down by the police). We held signs like “ceasefire now,” “hostage deal now,” “humanitarian aid now,” and “war has no winners.” But it was also heartbreaking to speak with current students who told me about broken friendships and a culture of hostility on campus. I was struck by a conversation I (…)

Editor’s Note: Takamure ltsue (1894–1964) was a prominent anarchist feminist in Japan during the interwar years. She advocated the elimination of political and social authoritarianism which was controlled by the male-centred bureaucracy. She urged a shift towards a society of agrarian self-government which emphasized harmony with nature, freedom from bureaucratic oppression, and women and men sharing in the production of the essentials of life. Through several debates in the late 1920s, (…)

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory:
Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Strauss and Rand
by Larry Alan Busk Rowman and Littlefield 2023. 276 pp. hb ISBN 9781666929638
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Reviewed by Matt McManus
For many decades now, anti-foundationalism has been a very popular position on the academic left. Influenced by an array of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, many have argued (…)

* The False Feel-Good About Indian Economy’s Performance Since 2014 | Arun Kumar
* Review of Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations | Anand Chakravarti
* India’s Chromium Boom: Ecological Concerns and Social Imbalances | S N Tripathy
Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Break out of exclusive ethnonationalism | Nira Yuval Davis
* Leon Trotsky | Paul Mattick (1940)

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, May 4, 2024
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be leading the show and outshining all with his hateful & divisive speeches in the 2024 national election campaign. Starting with his speech on April 21 at Banswada, Rajasthan where he expressly named ‘the Muslims’ alluding to them as infiltrators and as ones who produce more children and making wildly misleading claims on the opposition Congress party came in for widespread criticism in (…)

The ruling party is in election mode with daily pronouncements about how well the Indian economy is doing and benefitting not just the well-off but also the poor in the country. It has claimed a big reduction in poverty in India. It is stated that the Indian economy growing at about 7% is the fastest growing large economy in the world. Further, inflation is said to be tamed and employment generation robust, in spite of global head winds due to the Ukraine war and the pandemic.
It is (…)

The INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) alliance partners consisting of several opposition parties met in Mumbai on 1st September 2023 and declared, among others, that they came together to save the Constitution and democracy from the relentless onslaught of BJP and Modi regime. Little did they realise at that time that the issue of saving the Constitution would become a key electoral issue in the 2024 general elections and Dalits, scheduled tribes, Other Backward (…)