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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[...]

Manto in our Times- An Interview with Nandita Das

 Saadat Hasan Manto died on 18th January, 1955 in Lahore. Sixty five years after his death, Manto remains relevant to our times. His legacy shines on with his 22 collections of short stories and multiple collections of essays, personal sketches and plays. In the last few years, there has been a significant surge in the number of biographical movies produced in Bollywood. But, most of these movies are either based on sport-persons or social achievers. In the filmography of Hindi movies, there[...]

Letter from the Editors- September, 2018

Dear LeftWord Books community, In 1943, in the midst of the terrible battles of the Second World War, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took a massive book – 700 pages – to the publisher Gallimard and asked them to publish it. The book – Being and Nothingness – was a dense philosophical inquiry into human existence. It came out in August 1943. The publisher felt that it would not sell. In times of war, this was not a negligible worry. Paper was scarce, readers of such books even[...]

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[...]