Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015)
Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey).
Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst); Ajay Bhardwaj (Vancouver).
Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
EDITORIAL: THE EROSION AND POSSIBLE DEMISE OF BOURGEOIS LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Vinod Mubayi
At the heart of bourgeois liberal democracy there lay a contradiction. In the political sphere, bourgeois democracy promised equality via the familiar slogan One Man/Woman One Vote. In the economic context, however, the capitalist system, under which all bourgeois democracies so far have existed, presages inequality. The societal tensions inherent in this contradiction, historically, have been manageable as long as the gap created by economic inequality remained within socially acceptable limits. Under global neoliberal capitalism, economic inequality has soared to such heights that its social impact now threatens the demise of democratic functioning itself.
Read more…RSS: ARE YOU WAKING UP INDIA OR SLAYING IT DOWN?
Narayana Rao Rampilla
Am I to believe that a rally by Mohan Bhagwat, Chief of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), at Madison Square Garden will awaken the sleeping giant of India with a message of “universal oneness”? Could it truly uplift the suffering masses of India-be they Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, or Dalits?
Read more…MOHAN BHAGWAT IN MADISON SQUARE: POLITICS OF HATE AND MASK OF INCLUSIVENESS
Ram Puniyani
The Sarsanghchalak, the Chief, of RSS Mohan Bhagwat has undertaken a tour of three countries abroad. The first in the series was the United States of America, where apart from few other engagements his major event was to address the gathering at Madison square in New York. It was expected that over 5000 people would attend it.
Read more…REPEAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL, EXPLOITATIVE MINES AND MINERALS (DEVELOPMENT AND REGULATION) AMENDMENT ACT 2026
Rajesh Ramakrishnan
The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act 2026 is yet another blow struck by the BJP government at the Centre on behalf of corporates and against nature-dependent primary producers (farmers, fishers, forest-dwellers and pastoralists) of the country and the jal-jangal-zameen that sustains them.
Read more…SUMIT SARKAR TAUGHT GENERATIONS TO TAKE HISTORY SERIOUSLY
Shahana Bhattacharya and Aparna Balachandran
His legacy is of a historian of extraordinary scholarship, and a teacher who encouraged us to look beyond the obvious archive.
Read more…THE ‘HEPTULA’ CONTINUES
Aamir Butt
As India and Pakistan commemorated Independence, a recent Global Southasia article about cross-border love and friendship reminded this writer of a meaningless word for ‘absurdities’ coined by Manto.
Read more…BANGLADESH’S ISLAMIST EXTREMIST RESURGENCE HAS FEMINISTS RAISING THE ALARM
Nawshin Flora
ON 27 MAY, a group of women’s rights activists, artists, academics and others wrote an open letter to Bangladesh’s information minister, Zahir Uddin Swapan, protesting a proposed dress code for female news presenters issued by Bangladesh’s state broadcaster, which had discouraged the use of “large bindis” or “dupattas worn to one side”. The broadcaster’s deputy director general of news, Mohammed Shariful Quader, later told the media that the directive was “to maintain a general standard reflecting Bangladesh’s socio-cultural perspective.” The directive was later rescinded due to backlash, with feminist activists arguing that it amounted to an infringement on women’s freedom of attire.
Read more…THE FEAR BEHIND THE FENCE: CJP’S ‘SCHOOL THIK KARO’ CAMPAIGN AND THE REACTION IN BJP-RULED STATES
Anand Teltumbde
History’s warning is not that every grievance becomes a movement. It is more uncomfortable: sometimes the state creates the movement by the way it responds to the grievance.
Read more…CASTE, CENSUS, AND THE BIRTH OF ‘DATA STATE’
Anand Teltumbde
The BJP’s sudden embrace of the caste census marks one of the most striking political reversals in recent Indian history. For over a decade, the party had vehemently opposed caste enumeration, dismissing it as “vote-bank politics”, a “divisive agenda”, and an “urban naxal idea”. It refused to release the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011 and described the data before the Supreme Court as “flawed”. The ideological rationale seemed clear: Hindutva sought to subsume caste differences within a larger, unified Hindu identity, while a caste census threatened to expose the internal fractures that this project sought to transcend.
Read more…LONG READ: THE ROOTS OF CAPITALISM: SLAVERY AND THE SUGAR TRADE
Report by The Tricontinental Institute
The modern capitalist world was built not only in banks and factories but also through the plantations, ports, and ships that transformed sugar and enslaved human beings into sources of global profit.
Read more… Top