Editorial

 Verdict 2009 : Lessons and Tasks

The results of 2009 elections can be described as a string of surprises not only for many well-entrenched parties and seasoned politicians but also for a host of commonsensical notions about contemporary Indian political reality. Of late, it became rather customary to look at elections in India through the prism of coalition politics, caste equations and regional diversities. Verdict 2009 has given a serious jolt to this facile view and reasserted the underlying structural dynamics of Indian politics. Conventional wisdom would not have given the Congress anything more than 150 seats, but the fact that the Congress managed to notch up as many as 206 seats from across the country clearly reveal a national verdict which cannot be reduced to a mere sum total of the poll outcomes in different states and regions.....Full text

Feature

Poll Campaign And Our Performance :
A Preliminary Note

There were 80 CPI(ML) candidates in the fray in the 15th Lok Sabha elections. For nearly two months, the entire organisation dedicated itself to an intensive election campaign defying the summer heat and a busy harvesting season in many parts of the country. Through hundreds of local meetings in villages and rural markets, door-to-door canvassing and well-attended mass gatherings, the election campaign directly reached out to hundreds of thousands of voters. Printed and audio-visual campaign materials too played an important part in the campaign...Full text

A Closer Look at the Mandate

The success of the Congress and its UPA partners at the hustings have put it in a position to call the shots: fair-weather friends and many foes alike queued up to offer letters of support to the Congress. As we go to press, the Congress and UPA have formed Government; albeit not without some tensions within the UPA partners over ministries......Full text

Opinion

Current Economic Crisis and India

India’s GDP grew during 2003-08 at its fastest pace in any five-year period. Its rates of investment soared to levels comparable to East Asian economies. Its share market values more than quadrupled. Bankrolled by international finance, India’s private corporate sector began acquiring firms overseas. And the country’s business and political elite began to preen themselves as the ruling class of a new economic superpower. .....Full text

SPECIAL FEATURE

Indian Foreign Policy and Immediate Neighbours

Even as India was engaged in elections, the infamous role of the Indian government in its policy towards its immediate neighbours was being played out. The Manmohan Singh-led Government has been sworn in for another term; and democratic and progressive forces will have the challenge of further intensifying the struggle for a paradigm shift in our foreign policy in the neighbourhood....Full text

Fresh Crisis for Fledgling Democracy in Nepal

Arindam Sen

The recent developments in Nepal should take no one by surprise.  When parties with antagonistic class interests (like the NC and the UCPN (M)) join others with very different political agendas of their own (the CPN (UML) and the Madheshi Janaadhikar Forum for example) to try and run a government on the basis of an impossible "consensus" -- and that too with a very influential regional hegemon constantly playing its cards from across the southern border -- breakdown of the fragile arrangement becomes inevitable sooner or later, for one proximate cause or another.  In the event, the current crisis was precipitated by a showdown between the most advanced contingent of the anti-monarchical republican forces and the strongest bastion of the old feudal state power...Full text

Racism, Extermination, Genocide:
Sri Lanka’s ‘Final Solution’ for the Tamils

On May 18 2009, the Sri Lankan Government declared its ‘final victory’ over the LTTE, by displaying the body of the slain LTTE chief Prabakaran. Since then, the Sri Lankan regime and its army have indulged in an obscene orgy of humiliation. The body of Prabakaran, an international icon for the Tamil movement for self-determination, was displayed by jeering soldiers as a trophy – reminiscent of the manner that Saddam’s capture and killing was displayed by the US. Not content with months of unremitting shelling and chemical assaults on thousands of Tamil civilians, nor with the extermination of the Tamil self-determination struggle’s leadership, the Sri Lankan government is determined now to humiliate the surviving Tamils and flaunt the victory of its racist war. Prabakaran is being slandered as a psychopath and a coward, and his body is being cast into a mass, unmarked grave – to obliterate and tarnish the very memory of the Tamil struggle....Full text

Pakistan’s War on Taliban and America’s Af-Pak Gameplan

Even as the US military offensive intensifies in Afghanistan, a parallel offensive by the Pakistani Army, clearly under US pressure, in the country’s autonomous region of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is underway. Estimates suggest that over 10 lakh civilians are being forced to flee the Swat Valley, one of the major theatres of the war, in what is being called the biggest displacement of people since the Partition (1947). While US air strikes recently massacred 150 civilians, mostly women and children, in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military strikes are said to have killed hundreds of ‘militants’ – many of whom are also suspected to be civilians. ...Full text

REPORTS

Barhania Massacre: Popular Protest Forces Administration to Reject Police’ Version

On the eve of phase one of 15th Lok Sabha election the CRPF forces in Jharkhand picked up five innocent tribal villagers from Barhania village, massacred them in cold blood and tried to portray the victims as Maoists, in an attempt to pass off the whole incident as a successful police operation and bravery in the fight against Naxalism. Initially, they won accolades from the higher-ups in Administration. But this attempt was soon exposed after a courageous and timely action by the villagers and CPI(ML) in association with other democratic and progressive organisations. In the face of people on the streets demanding punishment for the CRPF personnel who perpetrated the massacre, the Administration and the police concocted various stories to save the criminals in uniform and tried various means to ‘prove’ the killed villagers as extremists....Full text

REVIEW

Reading the Past to Challenge the Present

Kavita Krishnan

Since that day in Cuba, other countries have set off on different roads on the experiment of change: perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime. Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is recovery of our destiny.
The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America’s tortured history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the contradictions of the past. History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be.” ...Full text

COVER

Severe Crackdown on Land Struggle in Punjab

The Akali-led NDA Government in Punjab has launched an all-out witch-hunt and attack on agricultural labourers in Mansa district – for the crime of demanding that the Government keep its promise of house plots to rural poor. As we go to press, around 3000 agricultural workers, mostly Dalits, have been picked up by the police, and leaders of the CPI(ML) and Mazdoor Mukti Morcha are under arrest. Shockingly, the All India General Secretary of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), Comrade Swapan Mukherjee, as well State Secretary Comrade Rajwinder Rana, was picked up from the home of a comrade, and has been jailed.....Full text