August 16, 2008

You have been supporting the Congress-led UPA Government for the past four years. On July 9 you formally withdrew support to the ruling coalition at the Centre by saying that the government went ahead to operationalise the Indo-US nuclear deal by approaching the IAEA to get the draft safeguards agreement, worked out by it with the IAEA, distributed to all the members of the international atomic watchdog’s Board of Governors even before it had been discussed threadbare in and cleared by the (…)

As we approach our sixtysecond Independence Day, once again we cannot but remember our indomitable freedom fighters, drawn from all parts of this vast landmass characterised by unique diversity, who underwent superhuman sacrifices and shed their precious blood so that we, belonging to a different generation, live a better life unfettered by the ignominy of imperialist domination and colonial exploitation. The debt of gratitude that we owe to them cannot be repaid.
Today, on August 11, we (…)

Forget all the loot of the past Forget all the heirlooms and jewels Forget all the gold and family silver Stolen, sold, resold, melted, moulded and parked away.
This time, Twentysecond July 2008 You went for the jugular of our faith You disrobed the Temple You stripped it of its dignity You pillaged its ethics You sacked its morality You pilloried its truth You hung its conscience upside down By stacking naked greed on the table.
The Reichstag was set on fire like this once But your (…)

“There are shining victories to be won in the cause of peace and social justice. We shall reach the new freedom by not submitting to economic slavery…. forward with the people.” —From an editorial in Daily Mirror in 1945, as reproduced in Hidden Agendas, by John Pilger, Vintage, Great Britain, 1998
[(This piece appeared in The Hindu before the trust vote in the Lok Sabha. In view of its importance it is being reproduced here with due acknowledgement. (…)

The last to lay arms and foremost to raise them against the British, the Sikhs of Punjab may not figure prominently in the galaxy of freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi barring Shaheed Bhagat Singh, who, too, was consistently disowned by Bapu, but the contribution of the Sikh people to the freedom struggle is no mean.
It is believed in all quarters that but for the intrigues in the post-Ranjit Singh’s Sikh hierarchy and the malicious strategy of the White man, the Sikhs could not have (…)

Remembering August Fifteenth has become a ritual followed with religious punctilio. This is as it should be, for the august day marked the end of national bondage and the dawn of Freedom.
But the balance-sheet of the thirty years since Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the Tricolour on the rampart of the Red Fort is a shame on our conscience as a nation, a proud nation that rightly claims no small place under the sun. Poverty, grinding, heart-breaking poverty pervades the picturesque landscape of (…)

The following is the concept paper presented at the national seminar, organised by the RSP on the role of the Left in the prevailing situation in the country. The seminar, chaired by veteran RSP leader Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, was addressed by the General Secretaries of the CPI and CPM and representatives of the CPI-ML (Liberation), Forward Bloc, CPI-ML (Red Flag), and several Left-oriented individuals including the Mainstream editor.
It is a widely accepted fact that India as a nation is (…)

The ideological basis of the ongoing phase of globalisation is ‘Washington Consensus’, which some people call ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘market fundamentalism’. The Washington Consensus was propounded by John Williamson in 1990. It indicated a set of policies that were prescribed by certain Washington-based institutions in 1989 originally to Latin American countries for adoption. These institutions included the US Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Trade Department besides the IMF, World (…)

In 1904, British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder wrote: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world.” A hundred years later, the heart (centre) of the world has moved east. Were Mackinder to write today, he would have said: “Who rules Central Asia commands the world.” It is this critical importance of the region that explains why Central Asia is witnessing a new “Great Game” today with the US vying for influence with Russia and China. It was (…)

Second thinking thrown up by recent discourse could be suggesting a consensual paradigm. This has to do with change in the political economy since the 1990s and its ingress into the nature of both contestation within and absorption into the system. Prior to that, the State (bureaucracy), landed property and industrial capital shared power with no one in possession of a decisive say over the other. Negotiation and contestation for representation were conducted through elections. However, (…)