AS the 79th Independence Day approaches, India stands at crossroads. On one side are powerful forces that are bent upon subverting the Constitution which enshrines the legacy of freedom struggle. These are the RSS, its political wing BJP, and numerous other associated organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar. Controlling the central government and several state governments for the past 11 years, these forces have been...
THE RSS-BJP has never accepted the federal principle that India is a “union of states.” For them, it is the RSS concept of Akhand Bharat that matters. Their conception of such a Bharat is a centralised unitary State where states are mere administrative units based on convenience. Seventy-seven years after independence, the federal principle enshrined in the Constitution, the separate spheres of jurisdiction listed between the centre and the states,...
WE are into the independence week. Spirit of celebration is in the air! Is it really so or a hallucination. But in our journey towards the 79th Independence Day, it will be useful to revisit those heady days in the past which shaped the future of interdependent India. Understandably, notwithstanding the clash of conflicting visions we came to a common understanding that if independence was to be consolidated, lessons of the...
IT is ironical that on the 78th anniversary of the victory of the Indian people’s struggle against British imperialism, US imperialism is openly bullying India into obeying its diktat. But that, it would be argued, is in the nature of imperialism; in fact during these 78 years there have been several attempts by US imperialism to make India conform to its diktat. But there are two basic differences between the current attempt and the ones earlier: first,...
WHEN our delegation* met the nuns, Sisters Preeti Mary and Vandana Francis in the Durg central jail, the utter injustice of the BJP government in Chhattisgarh was further brought home to us by the courage and dignity displayed by both the sisters. They were more concerned about the well-being of the adivasi youth Sukhman Mandavi who had been arrested along with them. The nuns have provided selfless service for decades in...
THOSE who are committed to believe in, and steadfastly practice India’s constitutional morality, are certainly ‘dismayed and disappointed’ over the Special NIA Court’s verdict acquitting all seven charge-sheeted in 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case. The verdict is symptomatic of the way criminal justice system is manipulated to serve the cause of the so-called Hindu rashtra. The latter’s sinister...
CONSIDERABLE time has gone by since the Air Accidents Investigation Bureau (AAIB) released its Preliminary Report (PR) on July 12 into the crash of Air India flight AI-171 a month earlier. The flurry of speculative print, online and social media reports has thankfully subsided. Many of these earlier reports had been driven by conjecture, fuelled by unfortunate leaks from within the investigation team. AAIB’s Preliminary Report (PR), which...
MIGRATION is a flow of labour that reflects both a circuit of active labour and a circulation of reserve army of labour. Different regimes of accumulation and emerging growth poles define the nature of both circuit of capital and labour. ‘Footloose capital’ prefers ‘footloose labour’ as production structures are more dispersed and in a state of flux in the current regime of neoliberal globalisation.
THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), in a statement issued on August 4, has unequivocally condemned the brazen and disastrous mass retrenchment plan of India’s largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which is set to affect 2 per cent of its global workforce – over 12,000 employees across India. This sudden attack has been unleashed upon the workforce at a time when TCS reported consolidated revenue of Rs 2,55,324 crore for FY...
BRINDA Karat, senior CPI(M) leader and former Rajya Sabha MP, has written to Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, on August 6, demanding immediate intervention to halt the clearance granted by the Chhattisgarh Forest department to the Kente Extension Coal Project. The project, she warned, would lead to the destruction of 1,742 hectares of dense forest land in the Hasdeo...
