Geography Archives: India

NARENDRA Modi said the other day, rather disparagingly, that the “Urban Naxals” live in air-conditioned comfort. Since all who speak or write in public upholding the right to dissent from the Hindutva positions, including even known critics of the Left, which means virtually all members of the intelligentsia who display any integrity, have been dubbed “Urban Naxals” by his government, his remark in effect amounts to targeting the entire intelligentsia.

Earlier this month, in Savar (Bangladesh), over 1400 delegates came to the fourth People’s Health Assembly–first held in 2000 by popular health organisations to drive a global dynamic to champion public health measures. At the centre of the discussions were increased health inequalities–between the rich and the poor certainly, but also sharply between affluent states and states that have found their wealth robbed by colonialism and the adverse order produced over the past fifty years.

WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.

A few days from now–on 29-30 November–a very large number of people will gather in New Delhi, the capital of India, to say that they stand with India’s farmers (kisans).

In the summer of 2018, the Indian State of Kerala was hit by severe rains and flood–the heaviest in nearly a century. The deluge affected 5.4 million people in this southern Indian state with a population of 35 million.

THE Indian economy is in a tailspin. This cannot be attributed only to innocence in economic matters of the command-centre of the NDA government. While that is indubitably a contributing factor, the current travails of the economy point to something deeper, namely the dead-end to which neo-liberalism has brought the economy.

Sagar Abraham-Gonsalves writes about his clawing helplessness as his father, Vernon Gonsalves, was arrested on Tuesday in the Bhima-Koregaon case.

This lack of distinction explains the decline in women’s workforce participation rates. The decline reflects a shift from paid to unpaid work.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the Hindutvavadi “nationalist” movement’s demonic drive for cultural orthodoxy seems to know no bounds. What is alarming is the former’s support for and complicity in the acts of the latter, as also the Indian state’s control of its “necessary” enemies through the use of state terror, with the category “urban Naxals” singled out in the latest of such drives (in June and August 2018) that otherwise routinely target Muslims, militant oppressed nationalities, and “Maoists.”

Massive Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Rally on September 5 to hit out at neoliberal economic policies, communal agenda, authoritarian attacks by the BJP government.

Since the extreme right-wing government of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, there has been an increasing crackdown on political and student activists, who are often branded as Maoists and anti-nationals.

THE communist-ruled Indian state of Kerala, hit by the most severe rains and floods in nearly a century, has had to overcome not just nature’s fury but also the active hostility of the central government in Delhi led by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

An analysis by IMD researchers has indicated increased disaster potential for instant flooding over central India, where the intensity and frequency of heavy and very heavy rainfall have been increasing.

It is impossible to go anywhere in India without being confronted with the terrible enormity of hunger.

The two retired professors are internationally reputed scholars, and are serving the honourary position of Professor Emeritus.

The year 2018 marks the bicentenary of Karl Marx, a philosopher and thinker who is partially understood without being read by his critics.

Friedrich Engels, while informing a common friend about Marx’s death in March 1883, wrote “…mankind is shorter by a head, and the greatest head of our time at that”.

In this in-depth interview conducted in Dakar, Samir Amin speaks on a wide range of topics: globalisation; generalised monopoly capital; the alarming growth of inequality; the role of the state in the neoliberal era; globalisation and delinking; capitalism and modernity; the return of fascism in the contemporary capitalist world, and more.

Ashok Mitra who passed away on May1, 2018, was the doyen among Left intellectuals in the country, held in the highest esteem by one and all for his absolute integrity, his outstanding intellect and his commitment to the cause of the working people.

Indian Americans’ susceptibility to conservative politics in the U.S. is itself a contradictory affair—on the one hand they have largely voted Democrat, but have publicly remained ambivalent about racial politics in the country. One key element of this ambivalence is the question of affirmative action and meritocracy.