Just months after a statue of V I Lenin was pulled down in Tripura by right-wing goons, the largest statue of the Communist icon in the country was installed in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu at the initiative of the CPI(M) Tirunelveli district committee.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury unveiled the statue. He congratulated the Tirunelveli district committee of the Party for the initiative and recalled how the legendary Tamil poet, Subramania Bharathi, who was a native of Tirunelveli, had penned a song praising the October Revolution.

THE 17th Maharashtra state conference of the SFI that was held in the Adarsh Vidyalaya, Mumbai, from December 24 to 26, 2018, was attended by 166 delegates and observers from 16 districts. They included 39 girl students. The stage was named after SFI martyr Abhimanyu from Kerala, the hall after a former SFI leader from Pune, Dr Shekhar Bendre, a young medical doctor who died in an accident last year, and the venue was named after martyr Gauri Lankesh, who was mercilessly gunned down by Sanatan Sanstha criminals.

PUBLIC MEETING

ON Saturday January 19, ordinary French people in their tens of thousands were again out on the streets of France, sporting the yellow safety vests that have become a global symbol of revolt. Since materialising as if from nowhere on November 17, 2018, and despite full-on brutal State efforts to contain it, the movement of the Yellow Jackets (Gilets jaunes) continues to confront French President Emmanuel Macron with his gravest crisis yet.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on January 17.

AFTER the fall of the Paris Commune, the Governments of the European countries organized police repression on the International’s sections and members. In France membership in the International was regarded as a criminal offence. The Governments of Germany, Russia and Austria were discussing joint measures against the organization.

Never since the defeat of the 1848-49 revolution had a campaign of slander reached such intensity in the bourgeois press, which resorted to every kind of falsification and misrepresentation of facts.