Left Parties Statement

THE Left parties – Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation, Revolutionary Socialist Party and the All India Forward Bloc – have, in a statement issued on August 10, jointly appealed to the people to:1.

Lebanese Portents

THE tragic events unfolding in Lebanon are a portent of things to come for the entire third world. Lebanon, a small, highly import-dependent country, has been in the grip of an economic crisis for quite some time as the world recession has become more acute; and with the coronavirus crisis, Lebanon’s economy has been reduced to utterly dire straits.

Air Crash in Kozhikode: Haunting Issues

AIR India Express ‘Vande Bharat’ Flight IX 1134 evacuating stranded Indians from Dubai to India, tragically crashed in rainy conditions on August 7, 2020 evening at Calicut International Airport in Karipur near Kozhikode, Kerala. The Boeing 737 NG aircraft overshot what is termed a ‘tabletop’ runway, went through the airport boundary wall, tipped over the edge to drop over 35 feet, and broke into three pieces, two large and one smaller, with the front portion damaged the most and having most of the deaths.

Toiling People Rise to Save India

SAVE India!

Cuba and the Complex Relationship between The Individual and the Collective

JUST recently, the 59th anniversary of Fidel's quintessential words to Cuban intellectuals was commemorated. One passage in the speech is particularly noteworthy. Fidel said, and I quote: "The Revolution… must act in such a way that the entire gamut of artists and intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionary, find that within the Revolution they have an arena in which to work and to create; and that their creative spirit, even if they are not revolutionary writers or artists, has the opportunity and freedom to be expressed.

How Not To Learn from Each Other

ON August 7, a virtual meeting was held between the foreign ministers of India, Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Australia and the United States. This meeting was, by all standards, a curious one.Foreign minister, Jaishankar tweeted, “Continued our conversation on the Corona challenge, always good to learn from each other”. But the composition of the meeting and the countries represented by the foreign ministers raises many questions.The lineup of the countries itself is inexplicable if the agenda was sharing experiences on tackling the Covid-19 crisis and the way forward.

No Double Standards for Apps

INDIA’s ban on Chinese apps for allegedly protecting India’s data sovereignty, becomes suspicious when we see no such problem with the US companies doing exactly that: taking Indian citizens data out of the country.Ravi Shankar Prasad, the minister for electronics and information technology and communications, in a self congratulatory vein, has approvingly noted how President Trump is following India by banning Chinese apps. Trump’s attempt is to force Byte Dance to sell its assets – TikTok app – in the US to a US company.

Increasing Child Sexual Abuse: A Wake-Up Call to Government and Society

AS many as 109 children were sexually abused every day in India in 2018 according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). 39,827 cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO) were reported in that year. But on an average, the conviction rate in child rape cases is less than 30 per cent and pendency of cases is as high as 80-85 per cent. India has come a long way in enacting legislations and legal measures to handle cases of child sexual abuse.

Narrative of ‘New India’: Destruction of Indian Constitution

AS we approach our 73rd Independence Day, a new national narrative is being scripted to bequeath to India’s future. This narrative of a `New India’ suggests that on August 15, 1947, India achieved its independence; on August 5, 2019, with the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution; and August 5, 2020, when the Ram temple construction was formally launched by the prime minister is the day of India’s real freedom.This new narrative is the complete negation of and the antitheses of India’s epic struggle for independence and the republic that emerged under the Indian con

CPI(M) Response to New Education Policy 2020 (NEP)

A. INTRODUCTION 1. NEP 2020 is a vision document rather than a real policy document.Despite its impressive sugar coating, it lacks in details and a roadmap for implementation. Many specific proposals of NEP are impractical and would cause enormous disruption for institutions, students and teachers, and would require considerable increase in public expenditure on education which remains a distant dream. NEP talks of gradually raising public investment in education to 6 per cent of GDP, but such promises have been around since the Kothari Commission Report 1966.

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