Strongmen Going Strong

There is bad news and there is good news. The bad news is that the strongmen are going strong all over the world. Jair Bolsonaro, the most extreme far right leader, won the Presidential Elections and will become the new President of Brazil early next year. As pointed out by our chief editor Vijay Prashad, 'Brazil, the largest country in South America, has decided to go the way of the Philippines, the U.S., Hungary and the others.' The good news is that Strongmen is also going strong. We are ta..

Facts of a ‘dirty war’: An excerpt from 'The Dirty War in Kashmir'

This is an excerpt from our new Shujaat Bukhari book  The Dirty War in Kashmir: Frontline Reports. Shujaat Bukhari was one of the most vital, balanced and well-informed voices in Kashmir. Perhaps for this reason, the 50-year-old journalist was shot dead by motorcycle-borne gunmen in Srinagar on the evening of June 14, 2018, as he was leaving the office of Rising Kashmir. This excerpt is from his Frontline report "Facts of a 'dirty war'" published on July 07, 2017 where he statistically anal..

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..

AG Noorani and Hindutva

We, at LeftWord Books, have been proud to publish the thoroughly-researched and laser-sharp writings of AG Noorani. Born in 1930, Noorani is a renowned advocate in the Bombay High Court and in the Supreme Court of India. It is that lawyer’s eye that Noorani brings to his historical and political studies, careful to map out the dynamics of human events but also to judge them based on a moral standard that oscillates between the barometer of common sense and the liberal constitutional tradition...