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LUCKNOW: With Priyanka Gandhi Vadra staying away from Uttar Pradesh after worst ever performance in assembly polls, senior leaders and rank and file are in a state of restlessness. It would be worth mentioning here that Congress could manage to win only two seats out of the total of 403 assembly seats in the state with two percent vote share.

After the defeat in the French presidential polls, the socialists and the left-wingers of all hues in France arrived at a historic compromise on May 4 to form an alliance for the legislative elections in June this year to meet the dual challenge of both President Emmanuel Macron’s party and the powerful far-right party led by Marine Le Pen. This total unity was not possible before the presidential election’s first round on April 10this year, even though the French communists have been sounding warning bells for long saying that the “noose is tightening around democracy”.

If the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi would have refused to listen to the suggestion of Rahul Gandhi to appoint Navjot Singh Sidhu as the Punjab Unit president or if she had initiated action against him once he launched tirade against the Punjab Congress chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, the Congress would not have lost the game in that state. She had committed big mistake by allowing Sidhu to continue. Once again she has committed mistake by asking the disciplinary action committee to explore action against him for his anti party activities.

To Nartwar Bhai Parmar, 69, son Jingesh Mevani always seemed a bit too idealistic. “He would talk about bringing about a revolution and I would like to say such revolution happened only before 1947.” He would then say, “I am ready to go to jail. In a sense, he prepared us for the worst”, says Parmar, talking about the case that landed Mevani in custody of the Assam police.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a geopolitical watershed. Its shockwaves continue to reverberate and are magnified by the wars in Ukraine and Yemen. Coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US withdrawal removed a major obstacle to Iranian projection in Central Asia and created an opportunity for Iran to potentially enhance its influence, increase trade, and expand security cooperation in Central Asia.

Saffron Majoritarian politics has finally succeeded in achieving its mission of forcing the Muslims to withdraw from the mainstream life and go back to ruts. This is clearly manifest in the manner Muslims celebrated their greatest festival Eid this year. Diktat was issued by the BJP governments to perform namaz inside their houses. In one stroke the saffron rulers reduced a collective celebration into an insulated performance. The Muslims showed their perseverance by not making diktat a big issue.

May 4, Wednesday 5 am, the loudspeakers started blaring. One began, and the other followed. The first one with the ‘azaan’, the second one with the ‘Hanuman Chalisa’. It was Raj Thackeray going ahead with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ challenge to the Maha Vikas Aghadi government on its refusal to do a Yogi Adityanath in Maharashtra, i.e., mute or remove loudspeakers perched on the minarets of mosques across Maharashtra.

Press freedom in India is in crisis though there are over one lakh newspapers including 36,000 weeklies and 380 TV news channels. Such an abundance of outlets conceals tendencies toward the concentration of ownership while media in politically partitioned, journalists facing violence and authoritarian pressures, legal framework no more protective, economic context turning adverse, and sociological context carrying deep bias. No wonder, India, fell eight places in the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) 2022 to be ranked 150 out of 180 countries in the world.

W.E. B. Du Bois is still the most famous black American Communist in US history, and the godfather of what has been called the black radical tradition. Best remembered for his remarkable work Black Reconstruction in America, he remains a vital reference point for those organizing against the violent forward march of capitalism.

Constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair... (what) we have to accomplish at present (is) ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. This slightly paraphrased sentence is quoted from a letter a 25-year-old young man had written to a friend way back in 1843. The young man had lived for another forty years and he lived precisely by this maxim, applying it to not just the external world around him, but also to his own ideas as he set about analysing the world and changing it.