Commentaries – Sanhati India

Indian agriculture in the age of liberalization

Several discussions are going on centering around Indian agriculture and its on-going crisis. Near about 180 farmer organizations across the country are marching and demonstrating on different demands of the peasants. Activists are debating to find out the primary demand…

Disinheriting Adivasis: The Gadchiroli Game Plan

In a statement issued on April 16th 2018, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) claimed that the ‘National Policy and Action Plan’ to combat Left Wing Extremism (LWE) is ‘a multi-pronged strategy involving security and development related measures’. This new…

India’s Labour-Market ‘Pivot’: Rough Estimates, Origins, and Implications

The challenges for radical labour organizers in India are immense, more so because capital exploits the employed workforce with a vast reinforcement of potential workers at its disposal, what Marx called the reserve army of labour or the relative surplus…

BJP’s new sand-mining policy: award contracts to party supporters

When Bhartiya Janata Party government was formed in Uttar Pradesh under the leadership of Yogi Adityanath, a number of educated middle class people thought that days of caste politics and corruption were over. They were expecting clean government. Yogi Adityanath…

Impressions of a Historical Materialism Conference

Conferences of Historical Materialism (HM), a Marxist academic journal founded in 1997 to promote research in Critical Marxist Theory have been annual affairs in London for fifteen years now. HM networks have held regional conferences in other cities including New…

Citizenship (Amendment) Bill is a tool of polarisation, but the issue of citizenship is important

The election manifesto 2014 of the Bharatiya Janata Party contained an important sentence, “India shall remain a natural home for persecuted Hindus and they shall be welcome to seek refuge here.”[1] This is no ordinary political rhetoric bandied around during…

Has Western imperialism weakened?

This issue has been actively debated in academic left, e.g. the following exchange between Harvey and Smith. David Harvey denies modern imperialism means the flow of surplus from ex-colonies to imperial powers and cites the rise of China to make…

An anti-people regimen

The 2018-19 budget of the Narendra Modi government has been touted as catering to interests of farmers, rural workers, women, Dalits and small businesses but nothing can be farther from truth. A strikingly paradoxical feature of this budget is the…

Adivasis seek to re-assert their traditional identity

‘Adivasi history is an unbroken chain of broken promises’ (Dr.B.D.Sharma) hence.. Adivasis seek to re-assert their traditional identity What are these broken promises? Massive displacement without rehabilitation: Independent studies estimate that about 24 lakh acres of their land has been…

TISS Students’ Movement Continues…

Tata Institutes Social Sciences Students’ Union in Mumbai released a statement on 3rd March endorsed by 5 out of 7 union members calling off the strike in all the struggling campuses (Guwahati, Tuljapur, Hyderabad) which began on 21st February. However,…