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Happy Birthday Shaheed Bhagat Singh: An Interview with Professor Chaman Lal

Bhagat Singh Read Marx, Watched Charlie Chaplin, Enjoyed Drinking Milk and Carried an English Dictionary in His Pocket. Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in Lyallpur district. At the age of 12, Bhagat Singh bemoaned the massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh. It would impact him for his entire life. In March 1926, Bhagat Singh formed the Hindustan Naujavan Sabha. In 1928, now with the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Bhagat Singh shot John Sanders, a British imperialist police offic[...]

Blue and Red Flags for a New Era of Struggle

September 16 was an important day in the attempts by the Communist Parties to forge closer links of solidarity and joint struggle with important Dalit leaders and movements. The two-and-a-half years of the BJP-led Government have been witness to unprecedented attacks on the people of our country, on their livelihood, their jobs, their security, their access to education and health services and to their right to eat, think, speak and write as they choose within the parameters of civilized behavio[...]

Are we living under fascism already?

Newsletter this Week..   In the latest post on the LeftWord Blog, Vijay Prashad points towards his rejoinder to Jairus Banaji's ad hominem attack on Prakash Karat. Karat makes a distinction between a fascist and an authoritarian regime, and Banaji, rather than engaging with the substance of Karat's argument, makes an ill-toned attack on what he considers 'Stalinism'. In fact, Banaji displays the very sectarianism he asks the Indian Left to shed.Vijay Prashad's rejoinder draws from his[...]

The Left and the BJP

On 6 September, CPI-M Politburo member Prakash Karat wrote an essay in the Indian Express. Here Karat, in a few hundred words, made the distinction between an authoritarian and a fascist regime. He argued that the BJP-led government is not fascist but authoritarian. The point of the essay was to show why there was no heated urgency to make a general alliance – from above – with the Congress Party and others against the BJP. What was needed was to create solidarity from below and to create an[...]

Dalit Resistance and the Role of the Left

A fundamental and core feature of India’s socio-economic structures is its caste system. Birth and descent determine positions in immutable social hierarchies. When Rohith Vemula penned his tragic yet passionate suicide note he described his Dalit identity as a ‘fatal accident’. And it is true. Had he been born into another caste, he would not as a child has had to witness his mother Radhika facing caste based indignities. Nor would Rohith and his sibling Raja have faced discrimination in [...]