‘Secularism’ and ‘Third Front’: Empty Phrases Vs Real Challenges

Four States had faced Assembly elections in 2007 and the Congress has lost all of them enabling the BJP-led NDA to end the year with four more state governments in its kitty. The Congress had been in power in three of these states (Punjab, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh) ......Full text

Justice for Bilkis

In 2002, a pregnant Bilkis Bano saw th irteen of her relatives murdered, her baby daughter killed, while she was gang raped by a communal mob in the Gujarat riots, a state-sponsored pogrom against the Muslim community .......Full text

CPI(M)'s Smokescreen of the 'Compulsions' of Capitalism      

On the occasion of the foundation day celebrations of Ganashakti, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya took the opportunity to air his favourite maxims about there being no alternative to capitalism in the present phase. In this context he defended his Government's policies of land-acquisition ......Full text

Musharraf’s Mounting Woes

Ahead of state who engages in a sequence of self-serving and contradictory public remarks about a matter as sensitive as the murder of his country’s former prime minister, would seem to put his chances of political survival at serious risk. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan ....Full text

Saffron Experiment in Orissa Laboratory

Kalinganagar in January 2006 and now Kandhamal in December 2007 – in both episodes we can see the twin faces of the Navin Patnaik’s BJD-BJP Government in Orissa, in which the most vulnerable sections of the state’s people – adivasis and dalit minorities – are subjected to corporate land grab and police brutality on the one hand and communal pogroms on the other ....Full text

CPI(ML) Fact-finding team Visits Kandhamal

On 14 and 15 January, immediately after the lifting of curfew, a joint fact finding team on behalf of CPI(ML) Liberation and CPI(ML) comprising of 17 members ....Full text

Remembering Kalinganagar, Nandigram   

This January marked two years of the Kaliganagar massacre and one year of the first assaults on the peasants of Nandigram. In the ensuing period, Kalinganagars and Nandigrams have multiplied, even as ruling parties of all hues are united in their policy of SEZs .....Full text

'People's Car' at People's Cost  

The Indian media is full of celebratory paeans of praise for Tata's 'revolutionary' new 'People's Car' - Nano, which costs a mere Rs. 1 lakh and is all set to replace two-wheelers as India's small-budget vehicle of choice. .....Full text

Singur Land Grab for 'Public Purpose'?

Much before Marx's inference that in a class-based society justice can only be in the interests of the class in power, Oliver Goldsmith wrote in the 18th Century that law was a shot in the arm of the rich to 'grind' the poor. Little wonder, Reuters wired a story gleefully, featured in the Guardian ......Full text

What Really Happened at Nandigram

Writing in defence of the West Bengal government, ‘Intellectual’ apologists of the CPI (M) have decried the persistence of the militant peasants’ movement in Nandigram as an illegitimate ‘struggle’ once the Chief Minister had asked the people of Nandigram to tear up the notification announcing the acquisition of land in the area .....Full text

CPI(ML) Activists Arrested in Anti-SEZ Agitation at Kakinada

The Kakinada Special Eonomic Zone (KSEZ) is one among the first three in the country which got permission two and a half years back. KSEZ is the promoting agency started acquiring lands long back at cheaper rates. The government has not acquired the land directly through the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation but allowed private organizations to do the same .....Full text