South Asia Citizens Web

The News International, June 9, 2007
We South Asians treat World Environment Day, June 5, as a mere ritual, to pay lip service to the cause of environmental protection while promoting ecologically unsound policies and activities.
Take India. At the G-8 summit, the Indian government couldn’t even formulate a response to the question the world is asking: what does India intend to do, as one of the globe’s fastest growing economies and its fifth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, to cut (…)

Mainstream, 19 May 2007 The following is what the author wanted to present at a meeting in Karachi when the leaders of the two Indian CPs—the CPI and CPM—visited Pakistan in the recent past. —Editor
I intend to ask a few questions to you. But first the perspective in which I am talking.
The international order as it has developed since the 1990s has been profoundly disturbing. I am sure you will share my overall assessment of a unipolar world in which one nation possesses far too much (…)

sacw.net - May 2007
IN the heat and noise generated in the Karnataka legislature by the controversy over Infosys honorary chairman and chief mentor Narayan Murthy’s views on the national anthem, another equally significant and damaging event virtually passed unnoticed – the hurried passage of the amendments to the Panchayat Raj Act by both houses of the legislature. There was pandemonium in both houses when the legislature passed the bill. In the legislative assembly, the opposition staged (…)

The traditional Left is converging rapidly with the Right, and irrespective of their stated political colours, and all the major parties in the parliament are merging into a colourless homogeneous mass, and a common economic agenda. Isn’t it Lenin who had said somewhere that economics is nothing but concentrated politics. By that criterion, political parties are now almost identical in their ’concentrated politics’, their differences carefully restricted to political rhetoric to keep the show going. The result is mind boggling double talk. In so far as the traditional Left is concerned, first Singur and then Nandigram drove home the point that the left politicians think the same way as the ’dream team’ of economic policy makers at the centre, who live constantly on the oxygen provided to them by the World Bank, the IMF and the Asian Development Bank.

Nandigram is a culmination of the West Bengal CPI(M) buying the logic of neoliberal economic policies. An anguished supporter of the CPI(M) asks why the party leadership in the state cannot, even within the capitalist framework, show an alternative path to industrialisation for the rest of the country.