SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades back, efforts to rubbish the November revolution and its underlying principles continue. It is another matter that the questions raised and the answers provided to some of the profound issues confronting the human society cannot be ostracised for good. They stand up with the full range of its ideological posers. In fact, with the passage of time they raise new vision in engaging with the current and evolving reality under contemporary neo-liberal capitalism.

Perhaps Vinayak Damodar Savarkar didn’t ever think that new-age Sangh Parivar patriarchs would drag him in such an uncomfortable controversy and that too involving none other than Gandhiji! While formally releasing a book on Savarkar on October 13 in the presence of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, Defence minister and former BJP president Rajnath Singh claimed that Savarkar had submitted mercy petitions to the colonial administration while he was locked up in the Andaman jail and that it was Gandhiji who had asked him to do so!

THE Government’s Roadmap for Ethanol Blending India 2020-25, a programme of the Niti Aayog and the ministry of petroleum & natural gas, was launched without irony on World Environment Day, June 5, 2021. This is the new avatar of several past policies which have been repeatedly re-launched only to crash again.

THE 2021 Global Hunger Report released recently has once again highlighted the deplorable conditions of food insecurity and nutrition in India. The paradox is that India is simultaneously the country with the largest number of hungry people in the world and the country with the largest public stocks of foodgrains.As per the latest Global Hunger Index, India has been ranked at 101 -- the lowest among all South-Asian countries except Afghanistan -- among 116 countries.

DURING the pandemic when the plight and sufferings of migrant workers had turned into the greatest human disaster, the Modi regime has, without any remorse, repealed the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 (ISMW Act, 1979) by “amalgamating” it with the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSHWC Code).