politics

An India without the Left?

To understand the Left’s central role, one has to take stock of the mass mobilisations to highlight injustice and inequity One out of every two Indians goes to bed hungry at night. That’s almost 700 million Indians. The number comes from McKinsey. But you don’t need a consultant to tell you about the distress in India. It is evident on our streets and in our fields. Agrarian distress (amplified by the suicide of farmers) and urban distress (illustrated by the growth of slums) have become [...]

Danish Husain: The only way to fight Modi's grammar of deception is that you continue to be relevant

Danish Husain is an actor, poet, storyteller as well as a theatre director. He runs his own theatre company called the Hoshruba Repertory. He is known for his revival of Urdu storytelling through the Dastangoi form and later inventing the multilingual storytelling project Qissebaazi. He has appeared in a number of films, including Peepli Live (2010), Ankhon Dekhi (2013), Newton (2017) and Manto (2018). Danish is also our author. He wrote a brilliant fable on Indian PM Narendra Modi in our [...]

An excerpt from ‘The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse’

Although a distance of more than a quarter-century separates us from that fateful day in December 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist, understanding of the Soviet collapse remains unsatisfactory and incomplete. The global working class is still reeling from the blows of that two-year period from 1989 to 1991 – when socialism was dismantled from Berlin to Khabarovsk. Yet, we still haven’t fully understood the nature of those blows. Such a situation must b[...]

Is Fascism Imminent?

A few weeks ago, CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat wrote a brief article in the Indian Express that assessed the character of the RSS and the BJP. He argued that the BJP is not capable of fascism because the conditions that would require the ‘terroristic dictatorship of finance capital’ – as the Communist International put it – do not exist. At the Sabrang website, historian Jairus Banaji responded tartly, saying that indeed the BJP-RSS is a fascist ensemble. Joining the debate then was LeftWo[...]