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.

 THE CPI(M) led Left Democratic Front in Kerala has announced its list of 124 candidates for the elections to the 140 member Kerala legislative assembly. There are 12 women and 11 independent candidates in the list.

THE second full budget and third one by finance minister Arun Jaitley has been applauded for “revival of rural India”. In his budget speech, Jaitley said the buoyancy in tax income, an indicator of the market’s confidence in the Modi government, has helped them spend more than the earmarked amount while sticking to the fiscal discipline. The government blatantly concealed the fact that the buoyancy in tax income is only in terms of direct taxes which does not need any confidence of the market in the government of the day.