dalits

Activist Arrests in India Are Part of a Dangerous Global Trend to Stifle Dissent

On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these peop[...]

Red Sun in a Blue Sky

Subhashini Ali delivered this speech at EMS Smrithi, Thrissur in June 2017:   25 years of neo-liberalism have seen the greatest concentrations of wealth and exponentially growing disparity.  They have also seen not only growing unemployment but lowering of standards of living of the middle class and working class people.  This is the natural result of the wage cuts and loss of jobs with guaranteed benefits. It has often been said that the market is not kind and it is unkindest to the poores[...]

Communist Histories

We are – with 2017 – a hundred years away from the Russian Revolution, whose audacity brought the workers and peasants of that vast region of Eurasia to power. The USSR lasted only seven decades, and – without doubt – there will be much made this year about its achievements and its failures. One can guarantee that more will be said of the latter than the former. What will be overshadowed is the achievement of the revolution itself – the fact that ordinary people could overthrow the anc[...]

We Are Najeeb: Identity Politics and the Left

Najeeb Ahmed, a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), was brutally attacked by a group of student activists from the Akhil-Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the forces of Hindu Rashtra. This attack took place at Najeeb’s hostel – Mahi-Mandavi. Najeeb, then, vanished. He has not been see since.  Protests by students and others – including Najeeb’s family – have been violently set upon by the Delhi police. The police force seems keener to shut down pr[...]

Blue and Red Flags for a New Era of Struggle

September 16 was an important day in the attempts by the Communist Parties to forge closer links of solidarity and joint struggle with important Dalit leaders and movements. The two-and-a-half years of the BJP-led Government have been witness to unprecedented attacks on the people of our country, on their livelihood, their jobs, their security, their access to education and health services and to their right to eat, think, speak and write as they choose within the parameters of civilized behavio[...]