ON October 11 in New Delhi Prime Minister Narendra Modi advised Indian farmers to grow more “export-oriented crops”. This amounted to saying that Indian farmers should move away from growing foodgrains, and the country should import foodgrains instead. This is precisely the advice that institutions like the World Bank, and Indian economists who generally echo its positions, have been giving for some time; and it is what the imperialist countries have been demanding.
THE decoupling of the world’s major economies is now gathering pace. The US, which had appeared to have reached a tariff truce with China earlier, recently ramped up its export controls targeting China’s semiconductor industry with its September 29, 2025, notification, “Expansion of End-User Controls To Cover Affiliates of Certain Listed Entities”. China’s response was on rare earths: it created a similar set of end-user restrictions on its...
THE desperation of US establishment to restrict imports and revive manufacturing is a futile attempt to create jobs for high school educated labour force who otherwise enjoyed a decent living in the twentieth century. The jobless growth which the US embraced during the neoliberal regime was a strategy to consciously relocate manufacturing to the global South taking advantage of cheap labour and natural resources while emerging as the...
THE Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar in 2025, presented as a routine administrative clean-up, has instead become one of the most controversial and troubling episodes of voter disenfranchisement in recent memory. Under the ruse of “purifying” the rolls, the exercise has removed lakhs of voters—disproportionately women, minorities, and the poor. From the outset, the process was shrouded in enigma, giving rise to...
A DELEGATION of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), led by the General Secretary, M A Baby visited the bereaved family members of Y Puran Kumar, IPS (ADGP, Haryana), who died by suicide. After the visit, M A Baby, wrote a letter to Shri Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, demanding a judicial enquiry into the suicide of Y Puran Kumar, IPS (ADGP, Haryana). Following is the text of the letter:
People across the country continue to be spellbound and gripped by shock since October 7, the fateful day a senior Haryana IPS officer Y. Puran Kumar ended his life at his Chandigarh residence. He would not have taken this step had the top bureaucracy listened to his complaints pertaining to the unending caste discrimination meted out to him by his seniors. Even more despicable is the fact that his cremation was...
According to the Second Advance Estimates of Production for 2024–25, farmers cultivating the 20 major Kharif and Rabi crops could have earned nearly Rs 3 lakh crore more if their produce had been procured at prices determined by the Swaminathan Commission’s recommended formula of C2 + 50% (see table -1). The 20 crops include paddy, cotton, soybean, maize, groundnut, wheat, gram, arhur (tur),...
THE far-Right block of the European parliament has assembled at the Auditorium Hotel, responding to a call under the banner of Patriots for Europe. Of the 720 members of the European parliament, 86 are present. It hasn't even been twenty days since Trump began his second term as President. All across the globe, the far-Right have been in a celebratory mood. The conclave is being hosted by Vox, a neo-Francoist far-Right party in Spain. The Who’s Who of the European Right are...
SLOWLY, a full picture of the devastation of Gaza by Israel is becoming clear. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) released a report around the time of the ceasefire that began to lay out the numbers: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza resulted in the total destruction of 190,115 buildings and the almost total destruction of another 330,500 housing units. The constant artillery and...
Responding to the catastrophic flood and landslide devastation in North Bengal, the CPI(M) and allied Left mass organizations— SFI, DYFI and AIDWA—have launched an immediate and unified humanitarian mobilization across the state. This large-scale, coordinated effort is effectively filling a critical vacuum created by the state administration, with activists and volunteers from Kolkata and elsewhere rushing to the affected...
