Recently, on fieldwork in a peri-urban panchayat in Kerala devastated by illegal large-scale granite quarrying, a local resident pointed us to what looked like a hillock. It was covered with vegetation — and flowers of a pleasant lilac — which made a very pretty sight — and to the naked eye, looked as solid as … Continue reading Molehills from mountains and other stories from kerala →
It is now about twenty-five years since the CPM in Kerala took the calculated risk of meeting neoliberalism half-way through an experiment in localising development. The People’s Planning Campaign drew eclectically on a range of ideologies, from Gandhian self-reliance to neoliberal self-help, not always in ways that were sufficiently self-conscious, but there can be little … Continue reading A people’s planning adequate to twenty-first century kerala →
The 6th lecture in the Democracy Dialogues series organized by the New Socialist Initiative was delivered by Com Dipankar Bhattacharya, General Secretary of CPI (ML) Liberation on 20 th December 6 pm (IST) where he spoke on ‘Fascism, Democracy and the Left’ Abstract : ‘Fascism, Democracy, and the Left’ With the rise of the … Continue reading Fascism, Democracy and the Left : Com Dipankar Bhattacharya →
‘The specific threat of National Socialism was obscured amid general talk of the perils of “fascists”, a term egregiously applied to Bruning, Social Democrats and all and sundry. Dogmatic catastrophist theorising led the Communists to actively underplay the Nazis: Ernst Thalman warned the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] Central Committee in February 1932 … Continue reading Bengal 2021, Fascism and the Left(s) →
[Inaugural Lecture of ‘Democracy Dialogues’ Series ( Webinar) Organised by New Socialist Initiative, 12 th July 2020] Join us on facebook.com/newsocialistinitiative.nsi for further updates ( Prof Suhas Palshikar, Chief Editor, Studies in Indian Politics and Co-director, Lokniti at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, delivered the inaugural lecture in the ‘Democracy Dialogues’ … Continue reading Trajectory of India’s Democracy and Contemporary Challenges
My earlier posts on the Kerala Left’s inability to forge an adequate and democratizing response to the ‘societal emergencies’ that have challenged Malayali society in the 21st century, and on the completely-unjustified attack on the body artist Rehana Fathima seem to have irritated, even angered, many supporters of the CPM on Facebook. These people are … Continue reading Break the Chain, Break the (Unconventional) Family? →
Let us call it ‘sudden death’ football style – even though, strictly speaking, there was no ‘tie’. Yet, even the highly frayed but continued existence of the earlier Nehruvian legacy (our version of the welfare state) had provided a kind of buffer that had kept in place an intricate balance between labour and capital. … Continue reading Working Class Movement and ‘Sudden Death’ of the 1980s – Challenges For Rebuilding the Left II →
I am making appeal here to all people who really care for children’s rights beyond the hypocrisies of the global child rights discourse. A controversy is raging in Kerala over a video of body art posted by the body-activist Rehana Fathima in which her two children paint an image of a phoenix on the exposed … Continue reading An Appeal for an Artist: Buy Brushes for Rehana Fathima’s Son →
Before I start, a request: Friends who are reading this, if you are close to Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen, or Soumya Swaminathan, or the other left-liberals who appear in the Kerala government-sponsored talk series from outside Kerala, please do forward this to them? I hope to reach them. The Left government in Kerala … Continue reading Why does the Left in Kerala fear Rehana Fathima and not COVID- 19? →
In this year of COVID19, the organized ‘working class’ movement completes a hundred years of its history. It was on October 31 1920, that the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), the first central trade union organization, came into being. This might be a good occasion to take stock – to look back into … Continue reading Crisis of Working Class Politics – Challenges for Rebuilding the Left →
