IT took nearly 24 hours from Bhubaneswar by rail and road to reach Nawarangpur district headquarters. The journey took eight hours more than required due to an extraordinary situation prevalent in this part of the world. The Maoists had found an innovative way of fighting American Imperialism-to blow up railway tracks that link these rich regions filled with poor people to the other parts of Odisha. The express train was literally being dragged to Damanjodi in Koraput district from where we were to proceed by road.
CITU has asked the central government to reconsider its decision not to appeal against the Bombay High Court order in the Vodafone case, and to seek the intervention of Supreme Court in defence of the steps taken by the Income Tax Department.
CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat addressed a huge rally in Rohtak in Haryana on February 14 on the occasion of the CPI(M) state conference and appealed to the workers, peasants, students, youth and all other sections of the working class to launch a decisive struggle to fight the pro-corporate and communal government at the centre, led by Narendra Modi.He condemned the Modi government for introducing anti-people policies through ordinances, bypassing parliament. Ordinances were brought in to make anti-people changes in the Land Acquisition Act and to privatise coal mines.
THERE is much that is wrong with the entire system of food security in India – procurement is far too focused on a few crops (rice and wheat) and regions (alluvial irrigated valleys) to the neglect and detriment of the rain-fed dry undulating areas, pulses and oilseeds. Thus, large sections of producers are excluded from the advantages of MSP and government procurement.
A LARGE number of activists gathered outside Dadar Railway Station in Mumbai on February 15, 2015 evening for a public demonstration of solidarity with Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand who are being hounded by Gujarat police with false cases.
The following is the statement issued in solidarity with Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand by intellectuals, academicians, writers etc on February 16. Some of the prominent signatories of the statement are
Irfan Habib, Noam Chomsky, Ashok Mitra, Romila Thapar, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Utsa Patnaik, Vivan Sundaram, Prabhat Patnaik, Mushirul Hasan, Arjun Dev, Jayati Ghosh, C P Chandrasekhar, Aijaz Ahmad, Sheldon Pollock, Akeel Bilgrami, Zoya Hasan, Mihir Bhattacharya, Saeed Mirza, Malini Bhattacharya, Sashi Kumar and Ram Rahman.
A zonal rally and convention of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) was organised in Pune on January 24. Thousands of students from different parts of Maharashtra and neighbouring Madhya Pradesh attended the rally. The main slogans of the rally were ‘Oppose Centralisation and Communalisation of Education’ and ‘Scrap RUSA (Rashtriya Ucchatar Shiksha Abhiyan)’.CPI(M) State Secretariat member Ajit Abhyankar inaugurated the convention at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Sanskrutik Bhavan.
THE All India Fishers and Fisheries Workers’ Federation (AIFFWF) strongly condemned the retrograde recommendations of the Meena Kumari Committee report and demanded the government of India to reject them totally.The meeting of the extended working committee of AIFFWF, which was held in the coastal town of Udupi in Karnataka on February 13-14, 2015 discussed in detail the Meena Kumari Committee recommendations on Deep Sea Fishing Policy and Guidelines and the impact of the Coastal Regulation Zone notification (CRZ) 2011 on the fishers.
THE year-long birth anniversary celebrations of Comrade Dasaratha Deb, a legendary Communist and icon of the movement for democratic transformation of Tripura, began on February 2. In the commencement of the celebrations, all the party offices in the state were embellished with red flags and portraits of Deb were garlanded.
AS part of the preparations for the 21st Congress of the CPI(M), Praja Natya Mandali (PNM), Andhra Pradesh committee has brought out an audio CD containing ten songs. The CD was widely sold during the state conference of the Party. These songs exhort people to join struggles and strengthen the CPI(M). Most of these songs were written keeping in mind the youth and were composed with peppy tunes. The CD was brought out to help the Party in the intensive and extensive campaign it had planned throughout the state before the Congress.