THE Panama papers have given a glimpse of the extensive network of shell companies and secret entities in tax havens around the globe which service the needs of the wealthy and powerful of the world. The Indian Express has published details of Indians who have utilised the services of a law firm, Mossack Fonseca, headquartered in Panama for acquiring shell companies off the shelf. These shell companies are registered in various tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands.

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma is coming under increasing political pressure, both from within his party and from the opposition on an array of issues. His handling of the economy has been particularly under the scanner. Plummeting commodity prices have hit the South African economy very hard. The South African economy is heavily dependent on mineral exports. The mining sector, dominated by big conglomerates, accounts for 35 percent of the country's exports. It is the second largest economic sector after the agricultural sector.

 ARUN Jaitley, the finance minister, has claimed that the BJP has “won the first round in the nationalism debate. The people who were raising anti-India slogans are now forced to say Jai Hind, or Bharat Mata ki Jai”.  This understanding underscores the Sangh Parivar’s jingoistic and purile notion of the ‘nation’. The Sangh Parivar, and indeed Jaitley would do well to remember that Jai Hind and indeed Bharat Mata ki Jai (where Bharat Mata is in chains with a tricolour not on a lion with a saffron flag) are slogans of the freedom struggle which the RSS was never a part of.

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement March 28, 2016.

THE dismissal of the Harish Rawat government and the imposition of president’s rule in Uttarakhand is a shameless assault on democracy and a blatant violation of the constitutional norms. The fact that the central action has taken place a day before the chief minister was to test his majority on the floor of the assembly as asked by the governor, makes this +intervention patently illegal and unconstitutional.

 THE intellectual effervescence, leading to the emergence of a new Left discourse incorporating the caste question, that has appeared in several campuses around the country in the wake of the Hindutva forces’ attack on institutions of higher learning and creativity, brings to the fore once more the relationship between the Marxist approach and the issue of caste oppression.