Geography Archives: India

Ever since the outbreak of the pandemic, first recorded in India end January 2020, this Modi government’s preoccupation had never been on combating the pandemic in right earnest and saving people’s lives but on continuing to relentlessly pursue the unfolding of the RSS project.

ON March 24, 2020, Narendra Modi had announced that the country would go into a lockdown after four hours! This nation-wide lockdown was to last till the end of May, after which there were local lockdowns but not a general one.

COVID-19 patients dying on the streets gasping for oxygen. Hundreds of wailing, desperate folks searching for hospital beds to access treatment. Even the dead denied dignified funerals, their bodies dumped unceremoniously in the rivers of India.

Akin to how characters in Dante’s poem paid for their sins in hell, Indians are paying with their lives during a pandemic for electing a government that is utterly incompetent and bigoted.

In India, doctors recently had to issue a warning against the practice of using cow dung in the belief it will ward off COVID-19, saying there is no scientific evidence for its effectiveness and that it risks spreading other diseases.

With an unprecedented volume of dead bodies, Brahmins and workers from other castes are working side by side in the crematoriums of Delhi. But caste defines every choice made among the pyres.

The World Health Organisation’s approval Friday for China’s COVID-19 vaccine known as Sinopharm dramatically transforms the ecosystem of the pandemic.

Kerala, a state in the Indian union with a population of 35 million, has re-elected the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to lead the government for another five years. Since 1980, the people of Kerala have voted out the incumbent, seeking to alternate between the Left and the Right.

The privatisation model pursued by successive governments, in health to education, has led to the perpetuation of class and caste divides, with the poor often left to suffer.

There is a fast increasing trend in cattle breeding towards sex semen technology which will result in birth of only female calves. 90 per cent success in ensuring success (in terms of having only female calves) is claimed by promoters of this technology.

While an assertive Hindutva deep state was already a work in progress under Narendra Modi, what is striking is how the contingency of the pandemic has been used to mask it with a no-holds-barred steamrolling of market reforms.

THE total number of COVID-19 cases detected across India crossed over 2,34,000 on April 17, the very day Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed an election rally in Asansol, West Bengal, where he congratulated the attendees for coming in large numbers and gushed that he had not seen such crowds at a rally before.

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faulted India for not fulfilling its obligation to supply COVID-19 vaccines to Europe. The Politico paper quoted Merkel as saying,  We now have a situation with India where, in connection with the emergency situation of the pandemic, we are worried whether the pharmaceutical products will still come to us. […]

Farmers from Uttarakhand and northwest UP–several of whom have taken part in the farm protests–say that the state-run mandis, though flawed, are essential for their survival.

Indian farmers and agricultural workers have crossed the hundred-day mark of their protest against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will not withdraw until the government repeals laws that deliver the advantages of agriculture to large corporate houses.

As the farmers’ protest against farm laws enters the summer season, they brave high temperatures and the paucity of basic necessities

Vaccine grabs, the refusal to relax patents to enable mass production, and the use of vaccines for diplomacy run the risk that poorer nations may not be protected against Covid-19 quickly enough. This will prolong the pandemic, even for the richer nations.

Marx, argues the author, is often misunderstood and even more often, misrepresented even as the world observes his bicentenary.

March 2, 2021 was the five year anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres, who opposed the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras. That date was less than one month after the deaths of dozens of people from Tehri Dam disaster in Uttarakhand, India. The two stories together tell us far more about consequences of the insatiable greed of capitalism for more energy than either narrative does by itself.

IN the week before the historic nationwide farmers’ struggle completed three months on February 26, the BJP has begun to pay a heavy political price for its pro-corporate adamancy.