THE communal poison regularly injected into the body politic by the Sangh Parivar and its growing numbers of supporters among common people and the administration has been responsible for numerous attacks on Muslims.  Most tragically, recent incidents have shown that children and infants are now being made the targets of these attacks.In Malvan, a small town in Sindhdurg district of Maharashtra, a young Muslim boy of 15 was apprehended by the police, his parents arrested and their small scrap shop was bulldozed by the municipal corporation on February 25.  All this was done on the basis of

RED Books Day is celebrated to honour the publication of books that disseminate revolutionary ideas and promote progressive political thought. We celebrate it on February 21, to commemorate the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the year 1848, and also to acknowledge the United Nations’ International Mother Language Day.

ON Friday, February 28, when US President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office of the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump mused: ‘I hope I will be remembered as a peacemaker’.As Trump talked about the necessity to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine, Zelenskyy fidgeted. The two men, representing two different sets of interests, did not see eye-to-eye either on the nature of this war or on the possibility of concluding it. Zelenskyy sees Russia as the out-and-out aggressor, and he feels that Russian President Vladimir Putin will never agree to a stable peace.

THE Modi-led government at the centre has unleashed a regime of destructive restructuring in governance through deregulation, for Ease of Doing Business (EoDB). The violations committed by the corporate and big-business sectors are decriminalised, while collective democratic expression and protest by the working people are being criminalised.

INDIA'S forest cover is on the decline. But government agencies consistently present data that support a false narrative of the country’s forests doing well with regard to both carbon sequestration and forest cover. Forest Survey of India (FSI) has the responsibility of publishing ‘India State of Forest Report (ISFR)’ every alternate year. The ISFR 2023 reported a 1,445 square kilometres (sq. kms) increase in total forest and tree cover compared to 2021, with 156 sq. kms attributed to natural forest cover and the remainder to tree cover outside forests.