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 Arand region.This project, which is part of the larger Hasdeo-Arand region coal project, was given to a Rajasthan government owned power utility.

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.

THE Left parties – CPI, CPI(M), CPI(ML), RSP, Forward Bloc and the CGPI, Basti Suraksha Manch  – in a joint statement issued on August 2, have welcomed Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta’s statement to halt ongoing illegal demolitions in slum settlements across the city.

IN the last one and half decades, West Bengal has borne witness to a chilling surge in gendered violence. From the shadowed alleys of Park Street to the sterile corridors of R G Kar Medical College and the rural tracts of Kaliganj, the state has turned into a stage for recurring, orchestrated attacks on women and people with marginalised gender and sexuality. These are not sporadic eruptions of criminality, rather together they form a normalised architecture of violence rooted in political patronage and patriarchal order.

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.