THE consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya on January 22 will symbolise the merger of State and religion under the rubric of Hindutva.  Central to the `Pran Pratishtha’ of the idol of Lord Ram will be the role of prime minister Narendra Modi, underlining the fact that this is a State-sponsored event. The Ayodhya ceremony is to proclaim Hindutva as the State ideology.  Both in the run-up to the consecration and the mobilisation of pilgrims to Ayodhya, there is the intertwining of the efforts of the State and the Sangh  parivar.The timing of the Ayodhya event has obviously been de

IN a short span of 54 years, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin left an inerasable imprint for the advance of the global proletarian revolution.  He not only mastered the essence of the creative science of Marxism, but updated it to his contemporary times and led the Russian Revolution to victory leading to the establishment of the first socialist country in the world – the USSR.  He enriched Marxism combating all forms of deviations and protected the revolutionary movement from derailment.

THE Indian History Congress is the largest body of professional historians of not only India, but the entire South Asia. Its list of membership runs into thousands and covers almost the entire subcontinent. This year too, our members from Bangladesh and even from Egypt and US attended the sessions.Founded in 1935-36 at Allahabad, with its first session at Pune, the Indian History Congress has always been regularly held, except for the years 1974 (Partition) and 1971 (Indo-Pak War).

CPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on January 8THE Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) welcomes the judgment by the Supreme Court nailing down the Gujarat government’s illegal actions of granting remission to eleven convicts who had been sentenced to life for gang raping of pregnant Bilkis Bano, members of her family and also mass murdering at least fourteen of them in the 2002 Gujarat communal carnage.

THE flames from Israel’s war on Palestine are continuing their all round destruction. Now there is a real danger of their spreading further. The list of dead is growing every day and so is that of those who are injured. The purpose of this write-up is to highlight one aspect of this destruction that largely remains uncovered – the destruction of sports. The attack on sporting infrastructure in Palestine is not simply a collateral of the overall destruction, but is a deliberate and targeted destruction.