Adivasis against the land grab in Kashipur, India

This remarkable video, created by ActionAid India, highlights the struggles of adivasi people against land grabs in rural India. Their struggle has resulted in some action by the Indian state; but far more needs to be done.

CPI (M) in crisis

An excellent assessment of the Draft Political Resolution of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which highlights the extent to which it will tie itself into knots in order to become electable.

CPI(M) in Crisis

the case for an alternative economic strategy

Jayoti Ghosh is one of the best heterodox development economists working today. Here is her recent prescription for equitably fixing the global economy.

Putting growth in its place: Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze on India's political economy in the 21st century

This is an excellent article by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen on India's social and economic performance in the 21st century. It was first published in Outlook.

www.outlookindia.com | Putting Growth In Its Place

"Every 30 minutes": crushed by debt and neoliberal reforms, Indian farmers commit suicide at staggering rate

A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. Democracy Now! speaks with Smita Narula of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, co-author of an excellent new report on farmer suicides in India.



Thanks to Peter Mollinga for drawing my attention to this.

The Maoist insurgency in India

From Jairus Banaji, this is a typically astute and erudite analysis of the Maoist insurgency in central India, written partly in response to Arundhati Roy's “Walking With The Comrades”. It is, in my view, essential reading for those interested in India, but also in anti-capitalist political forces and factors more generally.

The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the road for Indian Stalinism?

Rural India's communication divide and rural class differentiation

An excellent article from The Hindu on how social inequality in access to mobile telephones in rural India mirrors social inequality in access to land and other productive assets. Not surprising in the least, but having the evidence is extremely good.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Rural India's communication divide

walking with the comrades

I have just read an excellent article by Arundhati Roy, the famed Indian novelist, entitled 'Walking with the comrades', in which she tells of her visit to armed Maoist insurgents in eastern India this year. The full article can be read here:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/22-walking-with-the-comrades-aj-07

The article has provoked an interesting debate on an excellent website called Run from big media. You can review the debate here:

http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/#comments

These resources give an interesting insight into what Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls 'the gravest security threat' facing India today.

death of a communist

Jyoti Basu, who was the longest-serving democratically-elected communist leader in the world, has died in Kolkata. For students of international development in the North in the 21st century, the name of Jyoti Basu is all but unknown. It should be known. First elected to the legislature in 1946, before India's independence, as leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) in West Bengal he turned a slogan into a reality: land to the tiller.

In 1977 Basu's CPM was first among equals in the newly-elected Left Front Government in West Bengal, and Basu became Chief Minister. The Left Front under Basu's leadership implemented Operation Barga: it broke the concentration of land in the hands of a few rural oligarchs, offering tenurial security for sharecroppers and small plots of land to the landless. In so doing, the Left Front halted the rapid de-peasantization that had been taking place in West Bengal. The Left Front also implemented a decentralization of elected governance down to the local, or panchayat, level, allowing the peasantry to bypass the rural oligarchy and the lower rungs of the state bureaucracy, which was controlled by the rural elite in any case, and take more effective, more direct control of their lives. In effect, Basu was able to build a rural redoubt for a political party that in theory was supposed to be the party of the urban working class. Basu's accomplishment lead to 5 consecutive election victories for the Left Front, and Basu retired, undefeated, in 2000.

A very fair obituary of Jyoti Basu has been posted on The Guardian's website. You can read it at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/17/jyoti-basu-obituary

Pragmatic but radical change is possible within the prevailing social and economic system: Jyoti Basu, 1914 - 2010, showed this to be so.