When my brother called to tell me that that Professor Randhir Singh was no more I wanted, more than anything else, to be in Delhi.  I wanted to see him one last time with my own eyes and to hug him.  And, I wanted to be there with the crowd of people — of students, […]

The opening section of this note dealing with the most important issue in the current political situation—’the Maoist’ or the Naxal issue—sets the context for the argument that follows, which deals with issues involved in understanding and acting in this situation. I reproduce some key passages, marginally modified and compressed in one case, from my 2008 T. Nagi Reddy Memorial Lecture—now available as Indian Politics Today published by Aakar Books, New Delhi—touching upon these issues; a little reason and ability to interconnect is all that is needed to recognise the issue involved. I conclude with a brief summing up of the argument.

I have been asked to speak on ‘Future of Socialism’. What I am going to say is based on my recently published book, Crisis of Socialism — Notes in Defence of a Commitment, which may be referred to for the detailed argument in support of the propositions I am going to advance with the help of passages culled from this book. I am going to deal with the question in four separate but interrelated segments of my address.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its ‘actually existing socialism’, the latter’s truly grave deformations notwithstanding, has had the consequence of a worldwide crisis of revolutionary politics, a crisis really of the social revolution of our times which, however, even in the failure of its first efforts, has left the world significantly changed for the better, and though in crisis, has enough resources left for revolutionary struggles of the future, a resumed struggle for socialism