Geography Archives: India

Gautam Navlakha: How many of us have dared raise fundamental issues about what the state has been doing since 1947, since the transfer of power?  There’s not a single year in the last 63 that we have had since the transfer of power when the state has not been engaged in a war in one […]

  Christopher Candland.  Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan.  London: Routledge, 2007.  216 pages. This book, by Christopher Candland, sets out to provide a documented analytical and empirical study of the linkages between organized labor, development, and democratization in India and Pakistan from the colonial period till date.  It attempts to explain why […]

Prabir Purkayastha: You have written a lot about electricity in South Africa particularly, and you also talked about how this concept of services being priced so the cost of service is recovered is actually starting a complete ideological change in the way infrastructure services are delivered.  So what do you think is the real crisis?   […]

D. Raghunandan: [Media reports of] Pakistan tend to be overdetermined, or overwhelmed, by the issues of terrorism and extremism.  Professor Aijaz Ahmad . . . recently spent some time in Pakistan, and we thought this offers a good opportunity to look at other aspects of life in Pakistan.  Aijaz, what do you think Indians and […]

“The sheen of Maoist political ideology seems to be wearing off . . . do we have an instance where Maoists have stopped mining operations in affected areas or have taken up the cause of the tribals for higher wages or better living and working conditions for them?  If they have done so sometimes, the […]

  Chandra Prakash Gajurel is a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Q: Let me start with the most pressing question of the day.  Now that the strike has been called off, and it looks like the May 28, 2010 deadline for writing the constitution will not be met, […]

Whether Operation Green Hunt actually exists or is, as P. Chidambaram insists, a figment of the media’s imagination, Monday’s deadly Maoist attack on a bus in Dantewada suggests it is the hunted that are doing most of the hunting. Over the past six weeks, the Maoists in Chhattisgarh have killed more than 90 policemen or […]

On May 24, Iranian representatives, accompanied by Brazilian and Turkish counterparts, met with the IAEA’s Director General, Yukiya Amano.  The purpose of the meeting was to present a letter to Amano — as called for in the May 17, 2010 Joint Declaration by Iran, Turkey, and Brazil — formally notifying the IAEA of the Islamic […]

  People’s Union for Civil Liberties, 17 May 2010 PUCL strongly condemns the brutal killing of the innocent civilians traveling in a bus at Chingavaram on the Dantewada-Sukhma road in Chhattisgarh on 17 May 2010. Killing of innocent civilians is the most heinous crime against the humanity and has no justification whatsoever.  PUCL feels that […]

  Shabnam Hashmi is one of India’s leading social activists.  She heads the New Delhi-based human rights group ANHAD.  In this interview, she discusses various aspects of Muslim leadership in contemporary India. Q: Indian Muslims often complain that they lack effective and sincere leaders.  Why is this so? A: When India gained independence, the Indian […]

  The Fourth Strini Moodley Annual Memorial Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 13 May 2010 I In her historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the Great French Revolution through an illuminating character analysis and synthesis of three of that revolution’s most prominent personalities, viz., Maximilien Robespierre, Georges […]

  Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments.  Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.  282 pp.  $35.00 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 978-0-8032-1362-3. Pierre Bourdieu is unequivocally one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century, having influenced a strikingly wide range of […]

The agreement between Iran, Turkey and Brazil for a swap deal on the stockpile of Tehran’s nuclear fuel sets the stage for a diplomatic pirouette of high significance for regional security.  The paradigm shift affects Indian interests. The Barack Obama administration has hastily debunked the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal, which was announced in Tehran on Monday, and […]

May 19, 2010, TUCSON — Indigenous and American Indian studies scholars are condemning Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and related legislation. “Clearly, and bluntly, the state law is racist and discriminatory against so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ crossing the borders from the South, namely from Mexico,” said Simon Ortiz, a Native American studies professor at Arizona State University, […]

Brazil’s Ascent under Lula’s Leadership Under the leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has become a regional leader in Latin America with vibrant international foreign policy.  A look at the internal political dynamics of Brazil would be useful also.  During President Lula’s presidency, Brazil has had tremendous economic growth.  But in the coming […]

Linda Grant Niemann.  Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century.  Photographs by Joel Jensen.  Indiana University Press, 2010.  Pp. 168.  ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35446-4. Linda Niemann worked for twenty years as a railroad brakeman in the western US.  I have worked for twenty years in a railroad diesel shop in the eastern […]

On May 14, the day before the Minnesota walleye fishing opener, activists from two northern Minnesota Ojibwe bands exercised what they regard as their right to fish off reservation and outside of the state’s prescribed season.  They dubbed their action the “Great Anishinaabe Fish-Off” and held a Stop Treaty Abuse Rally on the shores of […]

15 May 2010 New Delhi We, the undersigned, strongly condemn the unprovoked firing and arson carried out by the Orissa state police against a dharna of farmers and fisher folk opposed to the proposed POSCO steel project in Jagatsingpur district. As per latest reports, today over 100 people have been injured and many shops and […]

Address at the Convocation of the Class of 2010, Asian College of Journalism In 1876, Lord Lytton, who was then Viceroy of India, decided to arrange a massive celebration in Delhi to mark the accession of Queen Victoria as the Kaiser-i-Hind, Empress of India.  The feasting, with all rajas and maharajas in attendance, went on […]

Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed.  What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India? The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism.  The 20th century saw the […]