Posts

Facing odds still moving ahead: Kulgam (Jammu & Kashmir)

Very few people know that the red flag of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPIM, staunchly defends the people’s rights against the police and military excesses here and also is a beacon to combat the designs of secessionist elements in Kashmir valley. In the state, the CPIM is a small party, which has only one MLA - Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami from Kulgam. Nonetheless, the party has faced great violence here, which is little known outside the state. Nearly fifty comrades have been killed b[...]

Adani, Jay Amit Shah & the Ruling Ideas of the Ruling Class

George Orwell’s 1984 echoes with the slogan – Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. The State, Orwell wrote, attempts to manage ‘knowledge,' to produce discourses that change according to its own interests and its agendas. The State attempts to ‘manufacture’ knowledge to achieve its ends, using all the power of its institutions to drive its project. The class that controls the State defines what is ‘correct’ in its time. As Marx and[...]

Adi Cooper and her research on the Tebhaga and Tanka Movements (1946-50)

Elisabeth B. Armstrong Adrienne’s Book In 1988, K. P. Bagchi of Kolkata published Adrienne Cooper’s Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950. A Bengali version of the book was published in Bangladesh, but this version tells only the economic history not the political history of rural people’s lives. In Economic and Political Weekly, Ranajit Das Gupta reviewed the English edition favourably. To tell the story of the 1946-47 Tebhaga movement in Bengal, Das Gupta wr[...]

In solidarity with Teesta Setalvad

In the times when the government institutions are happily dismantling the democratic values enshrined in the constitution of the country, renowned civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad was detained by police in Varanasi yesterday. She was in Varanasi to attend a youth training camp organized by Samajvadi Jana Parishad and to deliver a speech on 'Communalism and Education'.  Teesta Setalvad, in a Facebook live, said that she had been arrested on the orders of the higher authority. On 21st Septem[...]

The Killing of History (Guest Post by John Pilger)

John Pilger is an Australian journalist, author of a number of important articles and maker of some crucial documentaries (including about Cambodia, Indonesia and the indigenous peoples of Australia). I have long been a fan of John Pilger's work - it is well-researched, honest and powerful without being sensational. There is a dignity to his prose that I very much admire. In a lecture he gave at Columbia University, Pilger spoke of 'censorship by omission'. In that lecture, Pilger pointed to[...]