South Asia Citizens Web

Corruption is one of the defining issues of Indian politics today. The Aam Aadmi Party, which was founded on an anti-corruption platform, has just won the Delhi elections with a landslide. Mega-scams are widely held to have led to the Congress party’s defeat in the 2014 national elections.

Organised by Safdar Hashmir Memorial Trust & India Habitat Centre, this talk by India’s former rep at the UN General Assembly Mr Nirupam Sen on the 20th February 2015 covered a wide canvas of the history and context of Nehru’s foreign policy making, its achievements and its eventual dismantling. [The recording was made as part of the sacw.net audio archive in public interest and for non commercial use]

Jyoti Basu was the last of a generation. He was best described — for lack of a better description — as a sahib communist. That epithet referred to those sons of affluent families, many of them Westernized, who went to Great Britain, either for higher studies or to the Inns of Court to qualify as barristers-at-law, and then converted to communism. Many of these were from Calcutta: Sushobhan Sarkar, Hiren Mukherjee, Nikhil Chakravarty, Indrajit Gupta, Bhupesh Gupta, Arun Bose, Basu, of course, and others.

It’s not easy being a public-spirited activist in India these days.

“We welcome the approach of the Supreme Court in hearing this case as it rightly pointed out that liberties cannot be compromised for expressing dissent and had questioned the authorities on the need for custodial interrogation given that no major offences were committed,” said Evelyn Balais-Serrano