Ho Chi Minh, 2020

Tomorrow, 19 May 2020, is Comrade Ho Chi Minh’s 130th birth anniversary. Vijay Prashad speaks about what Comrade Ho meant to the Vietnamese people and their revolution; to the task of creating a socialist society in a country destroyed by thirty years of war imposed by imperialism, on land ravaged and poisoned by conventional and chemical weapons; and on how Vietnam has responded to the global pandemic, Covid-19, with a scientific and human approach. Below the video is a transcript of the tal[...]

Bhagat Singh, from Colonial Kolkata

Five migrant workers from Hoshiarpur were asleep in their rented room at 5 AM in a Kolkata neighbourhood. At that precise moment, their lives changed. A little-known episode from May 1933, locked in the Bengal police dossiers, points in the direction of lost histories of migrant workers linked with diasporic radicalism in Kolkata and the repression mounted on them by the colonial state. The records reveal the ways in which young migrant workers engaging with leftwing politics were persecuted fo[...]

The ‘Manifesto’ in India: A Publishing History

Today’s extract features a brief history of the publication of The Manifesto of the Communist Party in various Indian languages. It has been taken from A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto (LeftWord, 1999). Also see कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी का घोषणापत्र (LeftWord, 2019; bilingual edition). The story of how The Communist Manifesto came to be available in Indian languages is not well known. The Communist Party of India was founded o[...]

Murder in Mudukulathur

The killing of Immanuel Sekaran in September 1957 became a major flashpoint in Tamil Nadu politics. Memories of the Mudukulathur riots have been moulded to perpetuate and intensify caste conflict in the region ever since. Prof K.A. Manikumar’s Murder in Mudukulathur: Caste and Electoral Politics in Tamil Nadu (2017) helps set the record straight. Below is the preface to his monograph. Terrible caste violence broke out in 1957 in eastern Ramanathapuram district (Tamil Nadu). The reasons for [...]

A Blue Sky with a Red Sun: Remembering Comrade R.B. More

The 11th of May is an important day for us. It is the death anniversary of Comrade R.B. More who was one of the the most unusual, most amazing, courageous members of the Communist Party of India, when it was a united party and, later on, he also joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist). But what made him exceptional was that he himself and his work were links between the Dalit movement in the Konkan, in Maharashtra – links between Phule, Shahu Ji Maharaj, Dr Ambedkar – and the left move[...]