THE All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), in a statement   issued on June 4, has condemned in the strongest terms, the gang rape of the five NGO women workers in the Kochang village in Khunti district of Jharkhand.  The brazen manner in which the women were abducted at gun-point and raped and then silenced into not reporting the crime reflects the total lawlessness and the atmosphere of terror prevalent in the BJP-ruled state.

THE social life of Assam is in for a boil over Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, a proposition to grant citizenship based on religion, in Assam. Public anxiety became visible when the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) visited the state.Assam has always been a sensitive place when it came to questions of ethnicity and nationality. However, the intensity with which people reacted to the bill was never seen in the recent history of Assam.People and organisations representing all communities in Assam have anxiously participated in the public hearing at Guwahati and Silchar.

YET another CPI(M) leader, Tapas Sutradhar of Panisagar Sub-Division under North Tripura district, was killed on June 18 by the BJP assassins. Sutradhar was the Party’s Panisagar sub-divisional committee member, state committee member of the All India Kisan Sabha, and former pradhan of Uttar Padmabill gram panchayat. His body was identified by the villagers the next morning. He was killed at Padmabill near his house, while he was returning from a marriage ceremony at night. His throat was found slit. It is a pre-planned political murder carried out by BJP assassins.

THE National Alliance of Journalists(NAJ) and its Delhi affiliate – Delhi Union of Journalists(DUJ) along with various other bodies all over the country have come out with solidarity statements at the assassination  of Shujaat Bukhari. Massive protests have taken place in the Kashmir valley and a joint solidarity meeting has been held at the Press Club of India in Delhi, on June 18, called by the PCI, IWPC, Press Association and various other organisations. A black day protest in Delhi by the Delhi Union of Journalists was held on June 23, 2018.

TO commemorate the bicentenary of Karl Marx, CPI(M) West Bengal state committee has initiated statewide study circles on Communist Manifesto. As part of ideological-political training of Party members, study circles in all units of the Party were organised twice in 2017. The first topic was Party Programme, while the second was on Party Constitution. It was decided this year to observe 200 years of Karl Marx in a meaningful way. The study circle on Manifesto, the unparalleled revolutionary document, was scheduled to be held on May 5-6, on the birthday of Marx.