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Editorial |
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UPA Unmasked:
Intensify Mass Struggles against this Corrupt, Callous and Repressive Regime
It has now been one year since the incumbent UPA government assumed office in May 2009. Going by the poll-time promises and pronouncements of the Congress, “inclusive development” was to have been the keyword for the UPA-II. A government that cares for the aam aadmi, a government that would deliver essentials like employment guarantee and food security – this was the great promise that saw the UPA comfortably return to power in the last Lok Sabha election. But at the end of the first year, the poll promises are mostly forgotten – the rhetoric of food security has been overshadowed by the grim reality of unprecedented food inflation even as the government is preoccupied with Operation Green Hunt, threatening to gag every dissenting voice under the draconian UAPA. It’s time the ruling coalition renamed itself as the UAPA government!.”....Full text
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Commentary |
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The Network of ‘Hindutva’ Terror
Manisha Sethi
Almost a year and a half after the Maharashtra ATS arrested Sadhvi Pragya and a serving officer in the Indian Army, Lt. col. Purohit, for their alleged involvement in the Malegaon bomb blasts of 2008, the Rajasthan ATS arrested Devendra Gupta and Chandrashekhar Barod, men with close links to the RSS and its assorted organizations, as key suspects in the Ajmer Sharif blasts of 2007......Full text
Orissa :
New Chapter of State Brutality on People’s Movements
Tapas Ranjan Saha
In Orissa today, police have a free hand to shoot and corporations a free hand to loot. Naveen Patnaik, from behind his charade of ‘peaceful indusrialisation’, has emerged as one of the most trigger-happy lieutenants to displace and evict the tribals, peasants and fisherfolks so that mineral-rich land of the state can be up for corporate loot. Under the diktats of imperialist funding agencies like DFID and UNIDO, all the laws of land (like the Forest Rights Act ), all environmental concerns and all norms of democratic dialogue regarding rehabilitation are being flouted by the Orissa government to expedite the corporate land-grab at gunpoint......Full text
Jharkhand :
New Act in the Political Theatre of Opportunism and Corruption
Jharkhand is witnessing a new act in the theatre of the absurd that has marked the state’s politics in the decade since its formation. In the past ten years, the state saw seven governments, with the state’s ruling parties appearing willing to display dizzying political gymnastics in keeping with every opportunistic compulsion......Full text
Nirupama’s Murder:
The Violence of the 'High-Born'
Kavita Krishnan
In every home a burning ghat
In every home a gallows
In every home are prison walls
Colliding against the walls
She falls
Gorakh Pandey, 1982
Nirupama, a bright young journalist, had made her break for freedom from the prison walls of home and feudal society. As a graduate from the IIMC, living independently in a small rented room, and employed as a journalist, she must have felt reasonably free......Full text
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Cover Feature |
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Save Farm Land, Peasants and Agriculture!
Get Rid of the Reign of Loot and Plunder!!
Fighting Peasants Launch
All India Kisan Mahasabha
Kavita Krishnan
10 May 2010 marked the 153rd Anniversary of India’s First War of Independence, 1857. At Patna that day, it appeared as though the entire city was paying tribute to the peasant martyrs of 1857 and other historic peasant struggles......Full text
Inaugural Address of
Comrade Dipankar at AIKM Founding Conference
Comrades and friends,
It gives me immense pleasure to inaugurate this important all-India assembly of revolutionary peasant activists. On behalf of the Central Committee of CPI(ML), I extend my warm revolutionary greetings to all of you assembled here, delegates from the four corners of the country and our esteemed guests from Maharashtra and our close eastern neighbour, Bangladesh. Special thanks are also due to our comrades outside of this hall, especially comrades of Bihar who have defied all odds to organize this conference.....Full text
Manifesto of the All India Kisan Mahasabha
India is still a predominantly rural and agrarian society. Apart from feeding the entire country, agriculture also remains the main source of livelihood for the majority of Indian population. Yet agriculture continues to suffer the most from all that is backward and unjust in our country, be it the prevalence of ugly remnants of feudalism or lack of access to modern means of production or the shallowness of democracy and justice in our political system. Every government in India is elected primarily on the basis of rural votes, especially votes cast by poor and middle peasants, yet agriculture remains the most neglected sector of the national economy, and the poor and middle peasants remain effectively excluded from all official policies and priorities.....Full text
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Special Feature |
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May Day 2010 : Workers Fight Back
Rajiv Dimri
Workers all over the country under the banner of AICCTU observed May Day this year as a day of workers’ growing solidarity and resolve against anti-worker policies, price rise and state repression.....Full text
Mumbai Motormen Strike –
A Warning to the Government
V. Shankar
The Joint Action Forum (JAF) of Motormen unions of the running staff of Mumbai local trains went on a hunger strike from 6 AM on May 3, resulting in a lightning strike. The strike not only paralysed the entire metro and its outskirts but the parliament as well for a day. All MPs from Maharashtra, including Congress, BJP and Shiv Sena on the one hand, and the Left parties on the other, raised the issue and Parliament session had to be adjourned several times on May 4.....Full text
Pricol struggle: Breaking out of Encirclement
S. Kumarasami
If it is Operation Green Hunt in Central and Eastern India, in Tamilnadu it is crushing the emerging trend of revolutionary working class movement – with the Pricol struggle as the first and primary target. It was not just the Pricol management, but the Confederation of Indian Industries representing the entire corporate sector, that launched an “encirclement and suppression campaign” of sorts to annihilate the Pricol workers’ struggle for dignity, trade union democracy and a better life.....Full text
Coal Workers Strike Against Disinvestment
Sukhdev Prasad
India's Coal Industry, regulated by the Coal India Ltd., is a major disinvestment target of UPA-II govt., along with some other major CPSUs of the country. The Coal Minister, Sri Prakash Jaiswal, has already declared the intention of the Central Government to denationalize the coal industry. The Government through its present budget intends to amass Rs. 40,000 crore from selling off the profit-making CPSUs by means of disinvestment.....Full text
First All-India Conference of Health Workers Confederation
Chandan Negi
he First All-India Conference of All India Health Employees and Workers Confederation was held successfully at Jabalpur on 9-10 April 2010. About 250 delegates from 62 unions of health employees from all over India participated in the conference. The conference was hosted by All India Ordinance Factories Paramedical Staff Association, Jabalpur.....Full text
Struggle of Mumbais' Textile Mill Workers for Rehabilitation
Uday Bhat
In 1982 Mumbai's Textiles Mill workers waged a historic and long battle under the leadership of militant leader Dr. Datta Samant. 28 years later, the mill workers are back on the path of struggle on the demand of rehabilitation.....Full text
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Updates |
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Letter from Kerala:
Fighting Left Forces Regroup and Realign
nchiyam is a historic village in Kozhikode district in north Kerala. Way back in 1948, when the Communist Party had been banned by the post-colonial Indian state, this village, a communist stronghold, had become well known as a site of police repression and people’s resistance......Full text
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Book Review |
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Unearthing the Facts :
Corporate Rampage in Orissa
Radhika Krishnan
Felix Padel and Samarendra Das’s recent book Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, which essentially deals with the impact of bauxite mining and the manufacture of aluminium on the tribals of Orissa, has been published at a time when the aluminium industry is desperately trying to acquire land for new projects in the mineral-rich states of the country. It is a much-needed and fitting rejoinder to the myths that corporations, governments as well as the media continuously propagate – that this ‘sustainable’ and ‘environment-friendly’ industry will automatically lead to ‘development’ and prosperity.....Full text
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Film |
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City of Gold – Remembering the Mumbai Mill Workers’ Movement
Aslam Khan
As the working class, and even the middle class, disappears from the cinematic imagination of Bollywood obsessed with the Yash Chopra-Karan Johar style NRI romances, City of Gold , Mahesh Manjrekar’s latest film, promises to take us back to the gritty realism pioneered by the new wave cinema of the 1970s and 80s. City of Gold is based on the historic mill workers’ strike which began in January 1982 under the leadership of Datta Samant.....Full text
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International |
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Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition Assumes Office in Britain:
Through the Neoliberal Looking Glass with Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
Amrit Wilson
When Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government swept into power in Britain in 1979, the country faced its first round of neoliberal transformations – massive public service cuts, de-industrialisation, a vicious onslaught on Trade Union rights and blatantly racist immigration policies. Tony Blair, the New Labour prime minister who will go down in history as the man who declared war on Iraq and Afghanistan, continued and accelerated Thatcher’s policies of deregulation, privatisation, dismantling public services, and handing yet more power to finance capital......Full text
Cochabamba: People’s Fight for Climate Justice
Shashwat Sinha
On April 22nd over 35,000 delegates representing different social movements from 140 countries converged to Cochabamba in Bolivia for World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The conference was a response to the corporations and governments of the “developed” countries in Copenhagen, who in complicity with a segment of the scientific community discussed climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause. The cause, which the Conference most unequivocally declared, was the capitalist system.....Full text
Nepal: Stalemate Continues,
No Constitution Still in Sight
Propelled by a powerful people’s upsurge, the process of abolition of the nearly 250-year-old monarchy in Nepal had turned out to be quite swift and surgical. The subsequent process of republican transition has however proved to be extremely slow and tortuous. Even as the extended deadline for a new draft constitution draws near, Nepal is now stuck in a serious political stalemate.....Full text
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Cover |
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Dantewada Blast and After:
Reject 'Maoist' Anarcho-Militarism, Resist Operation Green Hunt !
After ambushing 75 CRPF men in early April, Maoists have struck again in Dantewada. On 17 May afternoon, a passenger bus was blown up in a landmine blast that left more than 30 passengers killed and at least another 15 passengers seriously injured, some of them reportedly quite critical. The bus was carrying some 50 odd passengers including some Special Police Officers (recruited by the state in the course of the Salwa Judum campaign), but there were no state police or CRPF personnel. In 2003, the PWG had targeted a bus in Warangal in Andhra Pradesh, for which they had subsequently offered regrets and apologies, but this time around the Maoists have feigned their ignorance about civilians being present in the bus.....Full text
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