The Challenge of Fascism With the gradual coming together of the opposition, hope has been generated across the country in recent days that the BJP can be defeated. This hope was first generated in a big way when the BJP was soundly defeated in the bypolls held across ten states in the country in mid-2018….
‘Where They Burn Books, They Will Burn Men as Well’ It had been a balmy early-summer day in Berlin, but by late afternoon, storm clouds started gathering overhead. As evening fell, a slight drizzle set in, forcing many Berliners to stay indoors. Yet, groups of young women and men—more men than women—started converging on the…
Anthropocene Age and Relevance of Tagore and Gandhi The earth is today facing a critical ecological crisis. A few months back Dr. Sanmatha Nath Ghosh, the socialist leader of West Bengal, arranged a discussion on “21st Century Socialism”. Socialists and Marxists all over the world are today deeply engaged in discussions on the worsening environmental…
Ambedkar’s Socialism: Some Reflections Babasaheb Ambedkar experientially and pragmatically looked at Indian society as structurally unequal because of the caste system that governed what a person born in a particular caste would get. He was naturally attracted to socialism as a system of property equaliser. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the first conscious attempt of…
100 Years of Amnesia It was meant to be the war to end all wars, another of those grandiose and foolish human notions. World War I, often dubbed the Great War, formally ended at 11am on 11 November 1918, though fighting on the far eastern front, in Russia, dragged on. If there was greatness in…
The Political Roots of Falling Wage Growth It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008….
From the Missing Archives of a Lost War It was nearly sunset on Easter Saturday when I met Marie Dz’dza. She was sitting on a set of steps in a hospital compound in the town of Bunia. Near her was her mother, Jesinne Dhewedza, and her niece, six-year-old Irene Mave. Two weeks earlier, I might…
‘Reservation Is Not Poverty Alleviation Programme’ P.S. Krishnan, the former secretary to government of India, was one of the crucial people behind the enactment of several historic laws regarding social justice. He spoke to the Wire on the Bill moved by the government to provide reservation to economically weaker upper castes in jobs and education….
New Era for Mexico’s Zapatista Army “We’re the product of 500 years of struggles: first against slavery and the war for independence against Spain, then avoiding being absorbed by North American expansionism, then promulgating our Constitution and expelling the French Empire from our territory, then against Porfirio’s dictatorship that denied the fair implementation of the…
Whither Bangladesh At the end of the post-poll cooling-off period, the Awami League set in motion the business of governance in Bangladesh. The decimation of the entire opposition in the elections gives the impression that the opposition is virtually non-existent in Bangladesh, but this is not actually true. There is no gainsaying the fact that…
दिल्लीत सुरु असलेल्या शेतकरी आंदोलनाच्या पार्श्वभूमीवर या लहान पुस्तिकेचे प्रकाशन लोकायत मार्फत करण्यात आले आहे. शेतकरी आंदोलन आणि त्यातल्या मागण्या या केवळ शेतकऱ्यांपुरत्याच नसून विविध अंगांनी सर्व सामान्य जनतेच्या हिताच्या आहेत, याबाबत मांडणी करणारी ही पुस्तिका!