Mainstream Weekly

Guest Editorial: The Strange Myopia of West Bengal CPI(M) | Aditya Nigam

Aditya Nigam — 2026-06-01T03:37:33Z

It must have sounded bizarre to those who do not keep abreast of political developments in West Bengal that the BJP chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, thanked the CPI(M) for helping him defeat Mamata Banerjee by transferring votes to him. Adhikari made this statement to the press even as counting was still going and widespread complaints of opposition counting agents being thrown out of counting rooms were coming in.
For people living in the state however, this connection between Ram (the (…)

- 2026

P. Sundarayya

Aditya Nigam — 2025-05-31T03:47:29Z

The resignation letter of the first General Secretary of the CPI(M), P. Sundarayya

- 2025

Need to go beyond puerile 'definitions' of Fascism | Aditya Nigam

Aditya Nigam — 2025-03-29T12:26:39Z

Quite apart from the dinosaur-like CPI-M position on fascism, there is a genuine and serious problem with the way we discuss or study the phenomenon - exclusively with reference to the Italian and German experiences (more German actually). Even that experience is reduced to some unhelpful superficial formulas like Horkheimer's largely misunderstood statement in 1939 'if you aren't willing to talk about capitalism, you had better keep quiet about fascism too', or Dimitrov's rendering of (…)

- 2025

Democracy – Beyond the Reform versus Revolution Binary | Aditya Nigam

Aditya Nigam — 2022-09-09T17:05:00Z

An arcane intra-Marxist debate has suddenly resurfaced, on social media, following the parting of ways of former Politburo member Kavita Krishnan with her party, the CPI(ML) Liberation. Arguments from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s — especially those that crystallized after Khruschev's disclosures about the Stalin era — are being retailed all over again. I am not particularly interested in these arguments, having both once been on the other side, defending Stalin and then having gone through (…)

- 2022