Geography Archives: India

On February 16, 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Pune (Maharashtra, India). Two men on a motorcycle stopped near them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them; one of the men laughed, removed a gun, and shot the two. Uma survived the attack but Govind died in a hospital on February 20, 2015.

Under the shadow of the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), countries are obliged to guarantee the right to health. The 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.

With her head bandaged and her arm in a sling, university student Aishe Ghosh went before the cameras to say that the students of the university she attends in New Delhi would move “not an inch back.”

Millions of Indians hit the streets today in support of the general strike and as part of nationwide coalition-building efforts to resist the policies of the right-wing Modi government.

This dossier is dedicated to offering an assessment of the moment we find ourselves in today. Part 1 provides a quick overview of planetary affairs; and Part 2 there are more detailed reports from our offices on their respective regions: South Africa, India, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America.

On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians.

Global climate strike led by Greta Thunberg and youth around the world has trigged climate justice debates in the mainstream. In India, from the past few weeks, we have witnessed climate protests in major metropolitan cities demanding governments to act on the current climate crisis to ensure a livable future for the coming generations.

Though the voices of rural women in India are some of the least heard, they are not mere passive victims. Many rural women strongly condemn their marginalization and pauperization—highlighting the flawed and biased developmental polices of the state, which they hold largely responsible for their hardships.

Tariq Ali on the situation in Kashmir.

The main conflict here – since the 1940s – has been between India and Pakistan. Disagreements are deeply rooted in the political culture of each country. The rise of the far right in India has only inflamed the conflict further.

Before India’s Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill in the Indian Parliament, his government sent tens of thousands of Indian troops into Kashmir. There is no official number, but it is often said that there are nearly 600,000 Indian troops in the state. That a population of 12 million people needs this kind of armed action suggests that they are an occupied people.

Property rights of people are protected under neo-fascism, except those racially, communally, sexually, or politically targeted whose properties are often confiscated.

Not just that, a dozen more incidents of mob violence have also been reported in which people were attacked, thrashed, injured, abused and humiliated by mobs for alleged crimes or no crimes in some cases.

Aijaz Ahmad argues that the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its fronts, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), display distinct fascistic characteristics, but the Indian state continues to live by the liberal playbook, no matter how hollow the Indian liberal institutions may have become. He anchors this proposition in a distinctive theoretical position.

The debate over inequality has become hotter world-wide. While Trump had introduced substantial tax cuts for the rich in 2017, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Teresa May, has promised to do the same if he becomes Prime Minister, there are strong proposals for taxing the rich which have also been mooted. Bernie Sanders had such a proposal for the U.S. during the time that he was seeking the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

On the one hand, people who spend most of their time working develop an understanding of the ‘practical transformation of the world’. This framework is implicit in the workers’ activity, since the worker–given the theft of their time–is often prevented from having a ‘clear theoretical consciousness of this practical activity’.

That raises a whole range of very familiar and long-standing issues that have afflicted the Left, leading to debates in India (and no doubt in other places as well) between the organised Left and what has come to be called the “ultra-Left” and the insurgent Left.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches its eighteenth dossier, “The Only Answer Is to Mobilize the Workers.” The challenges facing Indian workers and their strategies to fight back are explained through the insights and expertise of K. Hemalata, president of the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

In the final part of Capital, Volume I on “the so-called original accumulation”, Marx gives a dazzling overview of the often violent historical phenomena that contributed to the birth of the capitalist system, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

In this long interview with Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M., Akeel Bilgrami speaks at length on the concepts of populism, liberalism, fascism, postmodernism and post-truth.