May 31, 2008

With the Gujjar protest assuming menacing proportions to affect not just Rajasthan but also other neighbouring States and even the National Capital Region, both the Rajasthan Government and the Centre have their hands full. The demand for ST status for the Gujjars is nothing new—the community members have been seeking this for quite sometime and resorted to a similar agitation a year ago. However, as has been highlighted in several analyses and commentaries, a tenacious and concerted (…)

The Karnataka Assembly election results categorically indicate that he electoral battle was very intense with several of the candidates winning their seats with wafer-thin margins. How best can one explain the rationale of the Karnataka verdict? The devil is clearly in the detail.
In this election, across the State, the results indicate that the BJP has assumed the role that the Congress played in the 1960s and 1970s. In many constituencies, the division of the Opposition vote (Congress (…)

On May 4, around 11 am, a close friend of mine telephoned me to inform that Professor Suhas Chakravarty is no more. I broke down. I rang up to Dr K.K. Panda to confirm the news. The news was correct. I passed the news to Dr V.C. Bhutani (a close associate of Prof Suhas). Three of us attended Prof Suhas’ condolence meeting at the India International Centre. His condolence meeting gave a message—that a sincere, honest, dedicated, competent and missionary man is still honoured by the Indian (…)

The present food crisis is worldwide and is not a one-year affair because of some natural disasters or drought only. It is because of years of bad government policy in agriculture, as the Newsweek of May 19 has noted. The present abnormal food price in India is also because of years of bad agricultural policy of the government. For the last several years the growth food production was falling and no one took notice of it. The develop-ment of irrigation was badly neglected. The quality of (…)

[(COMMUNICATION)]
The Supreme Court has asked the government to make a statement on the historicity of the Ram Setu. If the government can show that the Ram Setu is historical, it becomes a national monument that must be preserved. If the government cannot show its historicity, the religious plea will hold good and the result is likely to be the same, namely, that the Sethusamudram Canal Project will have to be scrapped or the canal re-aligned overland.
The politicisation of the project (…)

[(COMMUNICATION)]
You are bravely exposing the criminalisation of the Left Front’s rule in West Bengal. The CPI’s Chaturanan Mishra’s call for discussion on socialism is being responded in earnest.
The murder and rape squads formed by the CPM in West Bengal are but copies of similar squads in Kerala. I had similar experience in the CPM in the seventies before my district unit resigned from it in 1978. Nikhil-da had the courage and integrity to publish my ‘Struggle for a New Line’ in (…)

After a long time, the price of basic foodstuffs is centre-stage. The balance of attention still remains on the overall agricultural crisis. The roots of that crisis are structural and deeper. They span structural issues in land, water and human relations. The time seems appropriate to review food prices in an autonomous regime. The economy of all agricultural production, more so commercial and industrial, concerns segments of the population. Price and availability of food concern all the (…)

On a frIGID EVENING IN February, Russia’s leviathan energy conglomerate, Gazprom, the world’s third largest company by market value, held a lavish 15th birthday bash in Moscow in one of the most hallowed halls within the Kremlin’s ramparts—the towering Palace theatre where the Communist Party of the Soviet Union used to hold its Party Congresses. The centrepiece of the gig on February 11 was a concert by Deep Purple.
Gazprom hired the rock icons for its coming- out party for a single (…)

The national Sample Survey data in “Income, Expenditure and Productive Assets of Farmer Households” 2003 have shown that the average annual income of a farmer household from cultivation is less than Rs 12,000 and that from all sources is less than Rs 25,000. It found that 96 per cent of the households are in deficit and half of the households are indebted. Debt waiver can only be welcomed in such a situation. Marginal and small farmers, once indebted, will hardly be in a position to repay (…)

With March 12 there has arrived a new dimension in Indian politics—qualitatively diffe-rent from what we have so far witnessed since independence.
Sometimes mainstream parliamentary politics was interrupted by outbursts of violence in some areas, and at some phase, there has been armed militancy as could be seen in the Communist campaign in Telengana in the first years after independence and the Naxalite struggle in the Andhra villages or the Naga and the ULFA movements in the North-East. (…)