Rihanna, Susan Sarandon, Greta Thunberg, John Cusack – the list of well-known celebrities endorsing the struggle of Indian farmers against the country’s new corporate-authored farm laws is growing by the day. What started out as a domestic fight by thousands of Indian farmers to preserve their livelihood and way of life is rapidly morphing into a global cause. And the[Read More...]
Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who sells it. This model involves highly processed food adulterated with chemical inputs ending up in large near-monopoly supermarket chains or fast-food outlets that rely on industrial-scale farming. While the brands lining the shelves[Read More...]
Two achievements of the ongoing peasant movement in opposition to the three agricultural laws which have transformed this movement into nothing sort of exemplary are: carving out a space for democratic resistance; and expanding awareness of the ill effects of capitalism pushed through policies of privatization-corporatization. These two achievements of the peasant movement contain special significance in view of the[Read More...]
“They may kill me but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body but they will not be able to crush my spirit”. These statements of Shaheed Bhagat Singh still echoes in the minds, hearts, ideas and soil of India. Though the colonisers killed him and finished his body, but the spirit of Shaheed Bhagat Singh continues[Read More...]
Kangana Ranaut again and again is attacking the Indian farmers as terrorists. She has done that in response to the world famous pop singer Rihanna and famous environmentalist girl Greta’s support to farmers movement. Sachin Tendulkar and other pro-BJP forces also joined the chorus. Most of these forces are pro-monopoly houses and hardly have any engagement with the agrarian production.[Read More...]
The irony of this is lost on a government drowning in its testesterone: with every nail studded barricade installed at Tikri, Ghazipur or Singhu, Delhi is making itself progressively redundant to the ongoing course of events, and perhaps even to the future shape of things in India. A subterranean tsunami is slowly building in the country and the power elite,[Read More...]
Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait’s tears has changed the dynamics of not merely farmers movement but politics particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Till January 26th, it was clear that the protesting farmers were largely from Punjab and those in power with their daily calculators at hand were visualising for a political profiteering from the prolonged movement. They had[Read More...]
The questions of national sovereignty are dominating debates in Indian politics today. The Indian media has become the voice of the BJP government led by Mr Narendra Modi. The government and media derides anyone as anti-national if one question’s the government of the day. The students, youths, religious minorities, Dalits, tribals, Kashmiris, human rights activists, lawyers, rationalists, writers, journalists, comedians,[Read More...]
Identity politics cannot subsume real politics. Hindutva built on Hindu identity cannot stop emergence of a challenge built on solidarity of the oppressed classes. Mandir Masjid can polarize and keep the people divided in the name of Hindu Muslim. But the challenge can come from somewhere else (Sikhs), though not on the basis of identity. Challenge can come from anywhere[Read More...]
In the previous part of this article we saw that the Indian rulers are actively preparing the legal groundwork for parting peasants from their land. In the following part we place this in an international context. The world economy is witnessing an intensifying drive by international investors to get control of land, including agricultural land, in the Third World. Why[Read More...]
