“WE are garment workers, we are meted out injustice. They say henceforth double PF would not be paid to us. We shall not work till we get it; even if we have to die for it.” Anasuyamma, a worker of AKR garments was telling us with anger on her face. “You are injured so much, yet you talk of fighting”, we interjected. Pat came her answer. “Yes, we shall not give up our right.” Anasuyamma’s lower leg, Jockey Garment’s 20-year old Asha’s head were bandaged for serious wounds.
THE slaughter of more than 70 innocents on Easter Sunday in the “Gulshan-e-Iqbal” children's park in Lahore has once again brought to the fore the serious threat posed by terrorist outfits to the security of the Pakistani State. The attack carried out by a suicide bomber was ostensibly targeted against the minority Christians who were celebrating Easter. But more non-Christians were killed in the attack and a large number were children.
SINCE the middle of February, 2016, more than one crore beedi workers, mainly in the rural areas, have lost their meagre daily earnings due to shut down by beedi manufacturers in protest against the health ministry’s notification increasing the size of pictorial health warning on tobacco containing products including beedis. This is taking place at a time when vast rural areas in different states are reeling under draught and the rural people are deprived of their earnings from agriculture and the failure of MNREGA to provide alternative jobs in rural areas.
WHEN the BJP government announced, in its latest budget, that it is determined to double farmers’ income in next seven years, the nation looked with awe. Critiques pondered over how that could happen in such a short time. The analysts scanned the budget documents to find out the allocations for agrarian infrastructure. But the government silently worked its way to create a new agrarian structure that coerces the small and marginal farmers to part with their precious piece of land and become daily wage labourers in the by-lanes of urban landscape.
Greets the working class and toiling people of the entire world and our own country, India;
Expresses solidarity to the fight of the working class and people of all the continents against the exploitative international finance driven neoliberal capitalist order;
Extends solidarity to the people in socialist countries and their struggles in defence of socialism in their countries; reaffirms its confidence that imperialist conspiracies to undermine socialism and restore capitalism in these countries would be decisively defeated
THE 7th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, held from April 16-19, 2016 concluded successfully with the adoption of various policy documents, reviewing the work done from the 6th Congress and election of the new leadership for the Party till the next Congress.
ISSUES concerning social justice surfaced strongly during the celebrations of 125TH birth anniversary of B R Ambedkar. This emerged in response to BJP and Sangh Parivaar's ongoing efforts to reinstate predatory and obscurantist opinions and ideology, and out of the struggle against these efforts. The concrete expression of such a resistance is visible in the movements in University of Hyderabad (UoH) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi among others.
THE world is currently smashing temperature records one after the other, with 2016 now looking very likely to be the third year in a row as the hottest year on record since 1850. Already, we have had hardly any winter anywhere in the world including the Arctic, and smashed the March all-time high temperature record by quite a margin.
THE Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI) has written to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and State Bank of India Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya over its recruitment policy and demanded that necessary changes be made in it so as to ensure that bona fide candidates are not left out of the process.
CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat joined a Kisan Sabha campaign on the issue of acute agrarian distress in the Marathwada region in Maharashtra on April 24-25. She, along with other leaders, visited 15-20 villages and met farmers and MGNREGA workers in Aurangabad, Beed and Jalna districts. She also visited cattle fairs and cattle shelters.