ON Sardar Patel’s 151st birth anniversary on October 31, it is worthwhile to look at the relations between him and the RSS/BJP. Why does the RSS/BJP appear to favour Patel so much? And what were his views about the RSS?

The efforts by RSS/BJP to appropriate Patel have intensified since Modi came to power. Propaganda is being carried out that if Patel had become Prime Minister, the fate of the country would have been different. It is claimed that injustice was done to Patel and that Nehru was jealous of him, and so on.

THE Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP) has naturally emerged as a serious concern for the indigenous communities of the Upper Siang, Siang, and East Siang districts of Arunachal Pradesh. Conceived in 2008 as India’s largest hydropower project, the 11,200 MW project, proposed across three districts of the Siang Valley, is now being projected as a strategic countermeasure to China’s similar plans upstream.

IN his foundational critiques of political economy, Karl Marx laid bare the essential dialectic of human existence. Mankind does not merely exist as an abstract biological entity. We actively produce, refashion, and discover our own nature through conscious, physical interaction with the material world. Labour, in its unalienated essence, is a creative process whereby sensory experience, trial, error, emotional friction, and reflective contemplation give birth to genuine human consciousness.

ON October 17, 2026, at short notice, more than a hundred women belonging to various women’s organisations like AIDWA, NFIW, AIPWA, AIMSS, All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA), AICCWW, Pragatisheel M S, Purogami M S, PMEK, ICWM, Collective, Saheli, SFI, KYS, CSW and Anhad assembled near the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara and marched to the Delhi Police Headquarters condemning the police brutality and sexual violence against women and transgenders during the ongoing protests against the Election Commission of India (ECI).

THE AIKS-organised Jharkhand Land Rights Convention was held on October 1, 2026 at the Assembly Hall in Ranchi, under the chairmanship of Asim Sarkar, state president of the Kisan Sabha. Addressing the convention, Ashok Dhawale, national president of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), said that this convention, organised on the birth anniversary of A K Gopalan and the anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, marked the beginning of a decisive movement against the plunder of land above the ground and minerals beneath it in Jharkhand.