Editorial

Assembly Elections Are Over –
The Battle Now Begins for the Lok Sabha

If the terror siege of Mumbai had left the country in a state of shock, the verdict of the recent Assembly elections should have a sobering impact.
The overall outcome of the Assembly elections held in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram suggests gains for the Congress and losses for the BJP. Before the elections the Congress was in power only in Delhi, now apart from retaining Delhi it has regained Mizoram and Rajasthan. The BJP will have to content itself with Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. ...Full text

Feature

India Must Not Succumb to the US Strategy of Proliferation of Terror

Dipankar Bhattacharya

The recent siege of Mumbai for nearly three days by a small band of well trained terrorists has almost universally come to be described as India’s 9/11. In terms of sheer audacity of planning and execution, the places targeted and the scale and range of people killed and injured, the Mumbai terror siege can surely be bracketed with the original 9/11, and in terms of the duration of the skirmish it can also claim to have left the original way behind.....Full text

Corporate Governance and Nuclear End Games Cannot Make Us Secure

Kavita Krishnan

In the aftermath of Mumbai, sections of the media have made much of ‘people’s anger against politicians and the system.’ What do we make of this claim? Sure, people are angry. Anger with those who rule us and with the system is surely a healthy emotion. Anger at those who are putting us in a position where we never know when our loved ones could be subjected to sudden and violent death; anger at those who circled around the Mumbai tragedy for votes, with the eagerness of vultures spotting a meal; anger at the shamelessness of those who vilified Hemant Karkare for his courage (in investigating Sanghi terrorists) in life, and tried to appropriate him in death; anger at Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi of the BJP who dismissed the people’s anger in loaded gendered language; anger at the Kerala Chief Minister who could not gracefully accept the feelings of a bereaved parent who wasn’t interested in meeting him, and instead indulged in unwarranted and contemptuous abuse.....Full text

Lessons from the Mumbai Terror Attacks

Prashant Bhushan

The recent horrendous terror attacks in Mumbai have woken up our elite citizenry of Mumbai and the country to the dangers of terrorism as nothing ever has. There have been many terror attacks in this country before -- each of those incidents killed almost as many or more people than the terror attacks in Mumbai. Only in the last few months, lumpen gangs terrorised and killed hundreds of persons in Orissa, Karnataka, Andhra and even in Kerala. Just last month, gangs of the local mobster of Mumbai, Raj Thackeray terrorised and beat up hundreds of poor and hapless North Indians, in Mumbai itself.....Full text

Workers, Students and Youth

March to Parliament against Terrorism, Communalism, and Regional Chauvinism

On December 12, the streets of Delhi saw the largest mobilisation yet since the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008, with many thousands of students, workers and youth marching condemning the heinous attack in one voice, and paying tribute to the memory of its victims.....Full text

Special Feature

Third Conference of Jhamas

Following the Jan Sunwai on 1 December, the Third Conference of Jharkhand Gramin Mazdoor Samiti (Jhamas) began at Comrade Ashok Kumar auditorium. The dais was named Comrade Rajeshwar Das Manch. The Conference continued till the next day in which around 600 delegates participated.....Full text

Eight Years Since Formation of Jharkhand
Third Anniversary of Nitish Government

All-round Betrayal of People’s Aspirations 

(The state of Jharkhand was formed eight years ago, in response to a long struggle, and this had raised aspirations of the people that they would, at last, be free from deprivation and exploitation of their resources. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s NDA Government has been celebrating its third anniversary with great pomp and boasts of ‘good governance’ and ‘development.’ In both these states, people have vigorously challenged the tall claims of ‘development’ by Governments and protested against the betrayal of their actual aspirations and rights. Below are reports of some of the major programmes in this context. – Ed/-)...Full text

Article

Financial Tsunami in US:
Investigating the Root Causes and Broader Implications

Part III

Arindam Sen

To re-enter the scene of the current financial turmoil, let us follow a very knowledgeable insider – George Soros. “…a boom must eventually lead to a bust…” he writes in a review of his latest book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, and explains why he is so worried:
“…the current crisis differs from the various financial crises that preceded it. …the explosion of the US housing bubble acted as the detonator for a much larger "super-bubble" that has been developing since the 1980s. The underlying trend in the super-bubble has been the ever-increasing use of credit and leverage. Credit—whether extended to consumers or speculators or banks—has been growing at a much faster rate than the GDP ever since the end of World War II. But the rate of growth accelerated and took on the characteristics of a bubble when it was reinforced by a misconception that became dominant in 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president and Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the United Kingdom….....Full text

From The States

Kerala : Land Reforms Undone

V Shankar

Land and to the Landless’ has become the slogan for a fresh round of land struggles in the state of Kerala that claims to have implemented one of the ‘most progressive’ pieces of land reform legislation in the country. These land struggles, in itself, are the tragic commentary of the ‘most progressive’ land reform that reduced the slogan of ‘Land to the Tiller’ to ‘Land to the Tenants’ in practice. Lakhs of agricultural labourers who were mostly dalits and most backwards and also the adivasis were forced to remain out of the purview of the first phase of land reforms in the state....Full text

Reports / Obituary

CPI(ML) Sankalp March on 6 December

On 6 December, on the 16th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, CPI(ML) held ‘Sankalp March’ programmes all over the country to pledge to intensify the struggle against the divisive forces of terrorism, communalism and regional chauvinism. Condemning the terrorist assault on Mumbai, the CPI(ML) protests on 6 December rejected all prescriptions of dictatorship, army rule, war with Pakistan and partnership with the US as ‘solutions’ to make us secure. They demanded punishment for the perpetrators of the Babri Masjid demolition as well as the communal pogroms at Mumbai (1992), Gujarat (2002) and Kandhamal (Orissa) and Karnataka in 2008....Full text

V P Singh

Dipankar Bhattacharya

Former Prime Minister Viswanath Pratap Singh passed away rather unnoticed on November 27, at a time when the attention of the entire country was focussed on the trajectory of terror in Mumbai. His end came after nearly a decade-old battle with blood cancer....Full text

Review

Oceans Apart

Kalpana Wilson

At first glance completely antithetical – The White Tiger and Sea of Poppies, both shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, share some common features and themes. Both begin in apparently isolated closed boundaried settings of villages in the plains of Bihar and eastern UP. And in both, this is a starting point for physical and metaphorical journeys across a world shaped by capitalist globalisation.....Full text

Front Page

CC Call for the Pledge Campaign
(18 December, 2008 – 16 January, 2009)

After decades of aggressive expansion, world capitalism is passing through a period of grave crisis. Big banks and other financial institutions have begun to collapse like nine pins in the US, the headquarters of the world capitalist economy. Huge sums of money are being pumped in by the American state to somehow keep these moribund institutions going. Passionate believers and advocates of unassailable American supremacy have begun talking about the decline of the US and a global shift of power from the West to the East....Full text