A PUBLIC meeting was held in Tirunelveli on July 12, to condemn the killing of Comrade Ashok, district treasurer of DYFI and CPI(M) activist, by caste Hindu goons. The meeting was addressed by CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, Tamil Nadu state secretary K Balakrishnan, CPI state secretary R Mutharasan, CPI(ML) Liberation state secretary N K Natarajan, SUCI(C) state secretary A Rengaswamy, DYFI all India president P Mohammed Riyas, DYFI state leaders S Bala, N Rejees Kumar, C Balachandra Bose and others.

THE employment guarantee scheme has been one of those government interventions in our country which have been most beneficial to the people. As per last year's revised estimates, the government had sanctioned Rs 61,084 crore for this scheme. But the NDA-II government has allocated only Rs 60,000 crore for the scheme in this year's budget – a reduction of Rs 1,084 crore when compared to the previous budget. Even though the scheme is supposed to provide 100 days of employment per worker, the average days of employment per worker so far is just 46 days.

ONE cannot but be struck by the tone of smug self-satisfaction that pervades this report, that India was the origin of most great ideas including the Pythagoras theorem and the Fibonacci series, that Indian universities like Nalanda and Taxila were unique and unparalleled institutions, and that Sanskrit has a literature that is larger than Latin and Classical Greek combined, and so on. In fact the report recommends the setting up of a Mission Nalanda and Mission Taxila to revive old glory.

SITARAM Yechury, general secretary of CPI(M) has called upon the secular democratic forces and the people of the country to meet the challenges thrown by BJP, the political arm of fascistic RSS. He addressed a seminar presided over by Janardan Pati, member of CPI(M) Odisha state secretariat at Bhubaneswar on July 7, on “Challenges before the country in the post election period.”

Below we publish the letter to the prime minister dated July 11, signed by around 30 Opposition MPs, on the raids at the homes of senior advocates Indira Jaisingh and Anand Grover. Those who signed the letter include TK Rangarajan (CPI(M)),  D Raja (CPI), Anand Sharma (Congress), Jaya Bachchan (SP), Santanu Sen (TMC), Sanjay Singh (AAP),