dissent

Reading Lenin by Vijay Prashad

In March this year, after winning the Tripura assembly elections, BJP cadres demolished the statue of Vladimir llyich Lenin in the Belonia town in south Tripura. Lenin was not only a supporter of worker-peasant movements but also a supporter of anti-colonial struggles. 'Liberation of all colonies' and 'liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations' was at the heart of the programme of the Bolshevik Party. The statue demolition galvanized the farmers in the Kisan Long March organi[...]

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[...]

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[...]