December 22, 2007 - Annual Number 2007

P.C. Joshi was born on April 14, 1907 and educated in Almora and the Allahabad University. Studying a diversity of subjects from Sanskrit to history and economics, he passed his MA in 1928 from Allahabad. After rapidly passing through a Gandhian phase, he became part of a Communist Group in Allahabad.
He worked in the Workers and Peasants Party of Uttar Pradesh, formed at Meerut in October 1928 with himself as the General Secretary. By the end of the year, an all-India Workers and (…)

The United States is watching with anxiety Pakistan’s painful march towards democracy, and it does not like the look of it. The return of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Pakistan has completely altered the political calculus and taken Washington by surprise.
By insisting on Sharif’s return to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia took matters into its own hands. Washington should have read the signal that something was stirring in Riyadh when, a fortnightearlier, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan (…)

[(MUSINGS)]
It would be sad, indeed, if we in India, should feel a sense of glee and vicarious pleasure in the tumultuous goings-on in Pakistan today. The situation there is so complex that it would take a political or mathematical genius to sort out the meaning of the moves and counter-moves, each more baffling than the other. It is a fact that the division of India on the quaint concept of the two-nation theory was a tragedy of Himalayan dimensions. Much controversy on the subject, hot (…)

Introduction
The recent turn of events in Nandigram has shocked many and perhaps it heralds the deep changes taking place in our politics. It is another watershed, like the Emergency in 1975, the New Economic Policies launched in 1991 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Each of them were a reflection of the ongoing changes in Indian society and led to realignments and shifts in the politics of the land. Each of them forced society to rethink and reassess critical aspects of our (…)

The cause of the demise of a young Bengali, Rizwanur in Kolkata has remained a mystery. After his body was found near a railway track, the police announced that it was a case of suicide. However, the evidence placed before the public pointed to something else. It came to be suspected that the death of the young man, who had married the daughter of a Hindu family, was a premeditated murder. It is well known that the State Government and high police officials pretended as if there was no cause (…)

The International Women’s Film Festival was to have been inaugurated by Aparna Sen, the well-known actor and film director, at the Eastern Zonal Cultural Council in Salt Lake City, West Bengal. But Subhas Chakrabarty, the State Transport Minister, said the organisers would be well-advised to sign her out and let Anindita Sarbadhikari stand in for her. Anindita is close to Alimuddin Street, the State headquarters of the CPI-M. Aparna, on the other hand, had fallen out with the party the (…)

Whatever has happened in Nandigram is as bad as the burning Gujarat of 2002 in Tagore’s Sonar Bangla, if not worse. Such a thing to happen in West Bengal is unthinkable. Bengal has been known in the modern political history of India for her tolerance, progressive thinking, secularism and modernity. But alas! Bengal under Buddhadeb babu has turned into a fascist, intolerant, communal State which is perhaps the biggest negative outcome of the Singur and Nandigram carnages.
The classical (…)

Bihar is a textbook case of stagnation, backwardness and poverty being thrust by political and bureaucratic mismanagement on an essentially good people.
That Biharis are a good people has been testified more than once by more than one leader of eminence. Mahatma Gandhi in 1917 called it a state after his heart. Dr Rajendra Prasad, the epitome of all that is good in Bihar, was made the first President of the Republic of India, Justice Tarkunde used to call Bihar the spearhead of Indian (…)

Both violence and non-violence have to be perceived and internalised in the context of sacrosanctity of human life and the volley of abuses, cruelties and indignities which are heaped against human life every day in India and abroad. Let me start with a couplet from Maharishi Valmiki’s Ramayan which espouses the validity of my thesis apart from enunciating lucidly and forcefully the quintessence of protection of all lives. I quote from the English translation:
O hunter, please do not kill (…)

[(BOOK REVIEW)]
Paradoxes of Chinese Socialism by Ravindra Sharma; Manak Publications Private Limited, Delhi; 2007; pages: 515+xxvi; price: Rs 900.
After the publication of his first book, China from Marxism to Modernisation: Post-Revolution Documentary History of the CPC (1956-2002), Dr Ravindra Sharma has once again come out with a book titled Paradoxes of Chinese Socialism—a topic dearest to his heart. Himself an ardent admirer of Mao Zedong and his radical thoughts, Ravindra Sharma (…)