Editorial

Financial Bankruptcies Rock the US : Bombs and Communal Violence Rock India

even years after 9/11, fear of a different kind seems to have gripped the US. Riding on a spate of mega bankruptcies, a huge dark shadow has resurfaced in the US, reminding the whole world of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. When flagship American financial giants tumble like ninepins and the state has to bail out companies that claimed to ‘insure’ people against risks of every kind, it is not difficult to see why the fear of 1929 should once again spread like a contagion. ...Full text

Commentary

Shake off the nuclear noose round our neck

Arindam Sen

Strange are the ways of global politics. In 1974 the US, along with Canada, imposed nuclear embargoes on India, which had just conducted its first nuclear explosion, and took the lead in founding the London club -- later to become the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) -- to quarantine India. In 1992 it pressured the NSG to adopt a set of “Export Guidelines” that made those embargoes universal, thereby blocking fresh contracts even with countries such as Russia and France. In 1998 it imposed fresh sanctions on New Delhi after the second Pokhran blasts. Come July 2005 and the same US .....Full text

The Dog Days Of September

Gary Corseri

Historians may look back on September, 2008 as America’s economic 9/11. Major financial institutions are collapsing—to use a bitter analogy--like the twin towers: first, Bear Stearns (already 6 months ago!); and now, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and the insurance giant A.I.G. Just as 7 years ago, we cry out, What hit us? Who did this? Why?....Full text

Buddhadev Reneges on Promises to Singur Peasants to Appease Tatas

Singur is back to square one. Soon after an agreement was reached between the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and the state government on September 7 for the return of land to “unwilling” peasants inside and outside the project area, Tata Motors adamantly announced its reluctance to part with any land. Dancing to its tunes, the government clarified that nothing would be done without its prior permission and the joint committee comprising representatives of the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and the state government collapsed. The temporary truce that provided a breathing space to both sides thus yielded place to the next round of pitched battle.....Full text

Cover Feature

Kandhamal, Karnataka, Delhi : Terror, Blatant as Well as Covert

(Serial blasts in our cities have become a grim, grisly, script that is played out again and again: claiming innocent lives and shedding innocent blood, and spreading terror among the people at large. The natural grief, anger, and fear engendered by terrorist attacks becomes handy political fodder for vested interests. However, investigations and response by the State and ruling class parties beg more questions than they answer or resolve...........Full text

BJP Government Shows its Communal Fascist Colours in Karnataka 

The BJP Government in Karnataka has taken just over three months to come out in its true colours. The Karnataka chapter of the Sangh Parivar has matched its Orissa counterpart in its communal fascist offensive against Christians....Full text

After the Blasts

The serial blasts in Delhi have blown new breath into the BJP’s clamour for a ‘tough terror law’ and revival of POTA. Not just the BJP, a committee headed by Veerappa Moily recommended a ‘tougher’ (more draconian) anti-terror law, and even the Prime Minister declared that such a move was in line with the “global consensus on the fight against terrorism.” When Manmohan Singh invokes ‘global’ trends to defend his Government’s policies – be it price rise or draconian laws – we know that he is using a euphemism to mask the consequences of India’s entering the strategic embrace of US imperialism.....Full text

Some Questions about the Counter-Terror Operation at Jamia Nagar, New Delhi

(A team comprising activists, academicians, students and journalists, including representatives of the Forum for Democratic Initiatives (FDI), teachers from Jamia Millia Islamia and the JNU Students’ Union General Secretary, visited the site of the police operation against alleged terrorists staying in an apartment in Jamia Nagar in the afternoon of 20.09.2008 (Saturday). Two alleged terrorists Atif and Sajid, along with Mohan Chand Sharma,....Full text

Feature

The rhetoric of governance in India has nowadays become pretty elaborate and sophisticated. Every government waxes eloquent about ‘good governance’ rooted in principles of accountability, sensitivity, empowerment, administrative efficiency, disaster management, transparency and so on and so forth. The current Chief Minister of Bihar too had been busy packaging himself as a veritable brand ambassador of good governance, till the Kosi floods washed away all his carefully cultivated image and revealed the true face of his regime. It is governance at its crudest and cruellest, typical of a feudal-bureaucratic order.....Full text

Kosi Flood: Facts and Observations

The desolate waterscape of flood-devastated Bihar, as far as Bihar’s two major ruling class rivals are concerned, is an arena for political one-upmanship with both Nitish Kumar and Laloo Yadav washing their hands off their own complicity in the devastation even as some 2 million victims wait for rescue and relief....Full text

Bihar Floods: The Inevitable Has Happened

The overflowing Kosi had, as of end-August, wreaked destruction on more than three million people living in north and east Bihar. A field visit reports on the misery of the affected, haphazard rescue efforts and criminal exploitation of the uprooted. The immediate task is to improve relief operations and then provide support to the displaced who will not be able to find work until the 2009 kharif season. A blame game is now in operation, but since the early 1960s whichever the party in power, the people of Bihar have been affected by official apathy towards the embankments on the Kosi....Full text

Reports from the Grassroots

CPI(ML) and AIALA activists in the affected areas threw themselves into rescue and relief work alongside the affected people and people of neighbouring villages from the first day the flood waters made an appearance. Now our activists are concentrate their relief work among the areas far from the main towns and the Government-run ‘mega shivirs’, in the high spots near embankments and MBC-JBC-Gangapur canals where large numbers of flood-affected people have taken refuge, and whom the state barely counts among those needing relief....Full text

Reports

JNU Students Force Boucher to Go Back

Alankar

In keeping with their anti-imperialist traditions, students of JNU successfully forced US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Richard Boucher to cancel a visit to JNU....Full text

CPI(ML) Protests in Delhi against Crackdown in Kashmir

he CPI(ML) held a demonstration at Parliament Street in New Delhi to protest the continuing military repression of protesters in Kashmir, demanding that the UPA Government ensure the release of arrested Kashmiri leaders and initiate an unconditional dialogue with them....Full text

AICCTU Dharna in Lucknow

he Uttar Pradesh State Unit of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU) held a Dharna in front of the State Assembly on September 22 against the Mayawati Government’s anti worker, anti-peasant policies. The dharna was addressed by AICCTU General Secretary Swapan Mukherjee among others. He lambasted the State Government saying those very Dalits and working poor who brought her to power have been and are being betrayed by this Government....Full text

Towards all-India Conference of AIALA
A Report from South India

Preparations towards the Third all-India Conference of AIALA to be held at Uttar Pradesh in November, have begun with a resolve to recruit lakhs of members in South, particularly in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karnataka and to make south an important areas of struggles in the country. In spite of relatively more capitalist development in agriculture in South, given the prevailing semi-feudal conditions in agrarian relations, the plight of agrarian and rural labour is no less comparable to any other relatively less-developed and backward regions in the state. Even the so-called ‘relatively higher growth’ is a misnomer as for as agrarian and rural labourers in the region are concerned....Full text

Women's Movement

Fifth National Conference of AIPWA

he Fifth National Conference of AIPWA took place at Ranchi on 5-6 September 2008. The Conference took place at a Hall named after Comrade Ajanta Lohit and Comrade Jeeta Kaur, and the dais was named Phoolo Jhano Manch, after the adivasi heroines of the anti-colonial movement. The Conference began with the hoisting of the AIPWA flag by veteran activist of the revolutionary women’s movement Comrade Mira. This was followed by tributes paid at a Marty’s Column to martyrs and departed activists of the women’s movement. In particular, tribute was paid to Kaushalya Devi, who had fought a brave struggle against her son Comrade Chandrashekhar’s killers, and who passed away on the eve of the Conference.....Full text

International

Face to Face with People’s Health in Caracas, Venezuela

omrade Surya and I were in Venezuela in December 2005 when we were inspired by the inroads the Bolivarian revolutionary process was making in the areas of health, education and workers rights. At that time we were unable to obtain a first hand experience of the remarkable free public health care system (Barrio Adentro). Mission Barrio Adentro also called Inside the Neighbourhood programme was founded in 2003 by the government headed by Hugo Chavez with the help of Cuban health care professionals. In May 2008, we were able to get permission and help from Ministry of the Popular Power of Health and National Direction of Indigenous Health in Caracas, Venezuela. They arranged an extensive tour for us of the Barrio Adentro levels 2 and 3 over a period of 3 days.....Full text

Tribute

Mother Courage: Kaushalya Devi

Chandrashekhar had a close and loving relation with his mother. No doubt, this was because he lost his father at a young age, and for a long time, both of them only had each other. His letters to her from school and the NDA were not formal missives – they communicated his fears, his feelings – and his changing convictions and developing political beliefs. In the letter telling her of his decision to leave the NDA and his determination to struggle to change the rotten society, he imagined she would one day be like Gorky’s ‘Mother’! One of his closest friends has written about Chandu’s anguish and concern on hearing she had suffered a dog-bite – leading to him rushing off to Siwan without a reservation.....Full text

Remembering Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh’s Statue in Parliament: Disturbing Questions

(Below are excerpts from a letter to the Speaker (Dt/- 17 August 2008), Parliament of India, by Prof. Chaman Lal, (editor, Complete Documents of Bhagat Singh in Hindi), protesting against the distortion of Bhagat Singh’s image in the statue installed in Parliament:

Not only family members of Bhagat Singh, even eminent freedom fighter Shashi Bhushan felt that the statue looks like that of a 50-60 year old man and not of 23-24 years young person.....Full text