March 2009

As we go to press the situation in Pakistan remains uncertain with civilian unrest having spread across the country spearheading the demand for withdrawal of Governor’s rule in Pakistan Punjab, abrogation of the Supreme Court verdict disqualifying the Sharif brothers from contesting elections, and reinstatement of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar M. Chaudhry, who was dismissed during the rule of former President Pervez Musharraf. While the lawyers have already started their (…)

It is now fifty years since the famous Tibetan revolt that forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India where he was readily given political asylum as a result of which Tibet became a far greater strain than before on the already uneasy India-China relations. Three years later followed the traumatic war in the high Himalayas. Even today, Beijing’s paranoid complaints persist despite India’s acceptance of Tibet being an “autonomous” region of China and a complete ban on any political activity on (…)

Although the mutiny by the Bangladesh Rifles has now come to an end, yet Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, was right while expressing doubts about the limited time-span of the rebellion to convey her anxiety that some more serious strikes might be in the offing in future. Available indications point out that in spite of the Awami League’s landslide victory in the last parliamentary elections, Bangladesh’s dissociation from the network of terror in the sub-continent is (…)

The Bangladesh polity is going through a grave crisis following the mutiny on February 15 by the BDR forces stationed at its Dhaka Headquarters. The worst phase of this crisis has been tided over, but the government has yet to deal with its far-reaching consequences. When Sheikh Hasina went to the BDR Headquarters on February 24 to inaugurate the celebration of the BDR Week and spent a few pleasant hours there, she did not see much evidence of the tragedy that was enacted the very next day. (…)

The Joint Committee of Muslim Organisations for Empowerment organised a National Convention on Muslim Reservation in New Delhi on February 1, 2009; Syed Shahabuddin, the distinguished erstwhile MP, was its Convenor. The following are the Concept Paper by Syed Shahabuddin for the Convention and the Resolution unanimously adopted at the gathering.
Concept Paper by Syed Shahabuddin
After independence, living under the shadow of Pakistan, the Muslim community was for long in a state of (…)

Democracy in India has survived for about six decades now. During these years India has witnessed numerous open threats to competitive politics, both from within and without and still she has survived. What is, however, important is that the democratic exercise that we witness in India is despite the kind of political parties and the resultant party system that we have. The blatant decay within parties and the self- destructive conflict among parties have succeeded not only in eroding the (…)

Last month passed away in the UK Victor Gordon Kiernan, 95, about whom his historian colleague, Eric Hobsbawm, has written in The Guardian after his death that he was
… a man of unself-conscious charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading German scholar H.U. Wehler as the main factor behind “the global impact of English (…)

In Britain Marxism was having a modest growth in the 1930s, and interest in India was kindling at the universities, especially in London, Oxford, and Cambridge where Indian students were most numerous, all of them nationalists and some turning towards socialism. Marxist groups of British and Indian students were formed, one at Cambridge by a Canadian, Herbert Norman; after his departure I was one of those who helped to keep it going. With some Indians communism was only youthful (…)

Only a few days, dear one, a few days more.
Under oppression’s shadows condemned to breathe,
Still for a time we must bear them, and tears, and endure
What our forefathers, not our own faults, bequeath:
Fettered limbs, each impulse held on a chain,
Minds in bondage, our words all watched and set down
Courage still nerves us, or how should we still exist,
Now with existence only a beggar’s gown,
Tattered, and patched every hour with new rags of pain?
Yes, but to tyranny not (…)

Victor Kiernan belonged to the group of British Marxist historians who made a great contribution to the writing of history. Having spent eight years in India, he was in close touch with the fledgling Communist Party and became a friend of P.C. Joshi, who was General Secretary of the party.
Kiernan was one of the intrepid British Communists who fully identified with India’s cause of Independence. While teaching in Lahore, he learnt Urdu and translated Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz into (…)