View Articles

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) visited Cuba on May 8-9. He began by highlighting regional unity as good for equal promotion of economic development for all states. AMLO addressed themes he had discussed previously when Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel visited Mexico City in 1921.

Why may one study Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), a contemporary of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) while studying Karl Marx (1818-1883) today? Some of the burning issues addressed by Rammohun Roy have remained with us since his time and, some others that had seemed to have been overcome, have come back with a renewed vengeance. Rammohun Roy was one of the makers of that Victorian England (Zastoupil 2010), in which Karl Marx lived and worked.

Sitting abroad and lashing out at the government, is not going to help the Opposition win the people at home over to its side. The ploy will boomerang even before the opposition leader tightens his seat belt on the return flight. Similarly, a pair of journalists writing anti-Modi pieces in the New York Times, and the Washington Post, isn’t going to win elections for the Congress.

COVID-19 crisis triggered school closure in India has induced learning poverty to such an extent that the country is set to suffer the worst in South Asia in absolute terms both in respect to jobs loss and decline in GDP, which in turn may accelerate each other creating together a vicious circle of shrinkage in both.

The one significant outcome of the Congress’s recent Chintan Shivir in Rajasthan was Rahul Gandhi’s acknowledgement that the party has lost touch with the people. Nothing demonstrated this disconnect more than the steep fall in the party’s Lok Sabha tally to 44 in 2014 and 53 five years later.

The decision by the Supreme Court this week that the powers of the Centre and the States to legislate on GST-related issues are equal debunks the idea that the Centre can ride roughshod over the states, as it has been happening to a large extent. The court’s judgment also strengthens the cause of the states, which have been complaining about the Centre’s unfair practices.

As India observes the 250th birth anniversary of Rammohan Roy, one of the earliest and greatest campaigners for modern India, on May 22, 2022, we are faced with one of history’s cruel ironies. The incumbent regime is pushing 21st century India into revenge-fuelled mass violence by distorting history and using the perceived wrongs committed by the Mughal dynasty that ruled India some three centuries ago. This paradoxical backdrop should help us appreciate the true significance of the battle that Rammohan and his contemporary reformers had to wage in the early nineteenth century to popularise the vision of a modern India in the face of aggressive colonial rule on one hand and fierce social and ideological resistance from within India on the other.

India’s domestic wheat market is on fire ever since the government said it was targeting record shipments this year after exports from the Black Sea region plunged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Wheat prices in India rose to record high levels in the last three months. In some spot markets, prices moved up by as much as 25 percent to Rs.25,000 per metric tonne as against the government’s minimum support price of Rs.20,150. According to the export trade, India's wheat exports hit a record 7.85 million tonnes in 2021-22.

Recent directive of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) requiring Virtual Private Network (VPN) service providers to store user data for five years, is yet another step to make India a full fledged surveillance state following all other internet based free flow of information having already been policed by the current fascist union government. Journalists, activists and others who use VPNs to hide their Internet footprint will now be in quandary to think whether to use such devices. According to official sources in the union government, for law enforcement agencies a move like this will make it easier to track criminals using VPNs to hide their internet identity.

The Communist Party of Chile PCCh supported Gabriel Boric during the general election, and he won the presidency after defeating the right-wing candidate whose family members had ties to Nazi Germany. PCCh has several key positions in Boric’s cabinet, driving some of the most ambitious “people’s projects” in the capital Santiago, especially in the Recoleta area, led by Mayor Jadue.