THE little girl has a smile that would light up the darkest space. Stretching out her little hands, she greets us, three strangers, P K Sreemathi, C S Sujatha and myself as though she knows us. We are here in Meppady to meet affected families of the Wayanad tragedy. Even two months later, so deep is the trauma that none of the survivors we meet speak about the horror of that night on July 30th, or how they survived.

IN the past few weeks, during exchange visits to India and France by security officials, France has seriously upped the ante on its competitors regarding provision of advanced defence hardware and, more importantly, technology transfer to India.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on October 9THE contrasting results thrown up by Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana state elections, the resounding success in Jammu & Kashmir and the unexpected setback in the latter provide valuable lessons for secular forces in the struggle against BJP in the days to come.In Jammu & Kashmir, the National Conference and its allies won a comfortable majority to form the first elected government after six years of central government’s authoritarian rule.  The unambiguous mandate of the people in Jammu & Kashmir is a re

AMIDST the backdrop of the ruling dispensation's diminishing fortunes in recent and current electoral contexts, the shrill noise over one nation, one election (ONOE) in its first appearance gives the impression that it is an exercise in sloganeering, yet another ‘jumla’. This echoes similar slogans by the BJP-led dispensation, such as one nation, one tax, one nation, one national language, and so on.

THE “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing of course in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the form of a competitive struggle between rival finance capitals that speedily completed the partitioning of the world, leaving no “empty spaces”; only a repartitioning of the world was thenceforth possible, through wars among rival financial oligarchies.