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Are Africans Made to Feel Unwelcome in India?

ByJanata Backup

Are Africans Made to Feel Unwelcome in India? The Madras Courier of July 17, 2018 carried an article with the above caption giving the first hand experiences of some Africans. In response to that article I felt like writing my comments. In a historical–anthropological perspective, people with an African background have been living in India…

Neo-Liberalism and the Retreat of Democracy

ByJanataWeekly

by David Schultz Democracy across the world is under siege. The latest Freedom House report that documents this for 2017 says, “democracy faced its most serous crisis in decades”, as seventy-one countries experienced declines in freedom or fair government, including the United States, and only thirty-five an improvement.  This was the twelfth consecutive year of…

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Massive Public Opposition to Konkan Refinery Project

ByJanataWeekly

Sukanya Shantha and Ruchira Petkar (Note: This article has been edited by us.) On May 30, around 15,000 villagers – the police had come prepared for around 10,000 protestors – gathered at the Rajiv Gandhi Maidan in Rajapur to demand an uncompromising roll-back of an oil refinery project announced by Fadnavis’s government early last year….
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Chavismo: Part IV | ‘We Are All Soldiers’

ByJanata Backup

The fourth part of a series of seven articles by Marco Teruggi on Chavismo, the ongoing socialist revolutionary project in Venezuela, that the Venezuelans fondly call Bolivarian revolution. I was captivated by the man the very first time I saw him in Mar del Plata (Argentina), in 2005. He was standing before a packed stadium,…
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Saying a Firm ‘No’ To Displacement: Mahava Bharala Struggle in Rajasthan

ByBharat Dogra

Saying a Firm ‘No’ To Displacement: Mahava Bharala Struggle in Rajasthan At a time when there is growing social and legal agreement that farmers’ lands should not be acquired where the entire community is firmly opposed to it and when there are other options available to the government, it is inexplicable why the government has…

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A False Step

ByKuldip Nayar

Pranab  Mukherjee has accepted the invitation to visit the RSS headquarters at Nagpur to address the cadre. To quote RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, “Mukherjee was graceful enough to accept the invitation.” Mukherjee accepting the invite is a surprise because the place never put up the picture of Mahatma Gandhi because he represented an ideology of…

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Secularism and the State: Categorising the Nehru Model

ByJanataWeekly

Anil Nauriya The “Nehru Models”: The Historical Nehru Model and the Posthumous Nehru Model In most circles where opinion making on behalf of minorities takes place, one of the reasons for appreciation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s approach towards the minorities generally is his statement that majority communalism, that is, sectarianism, is more dangerous than minority communalism….

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The Enigma Called Gandhi

BySalil Misra

Politics in independent India has shown a tremendous obsession with Gandhi.  Khadi, worn by most politicians, protests through Satyagraha, hunger strikes, voluntarily courting arrest, civil disobedience, all carry the indelible stamp of the politics practised by Gandhi during the course of the national movement. Most rituals and symbols of Indian politics today emanate from Gandhi….

Re-emergence of Regional Parties Bothers BJP

ByJanataWeekly

The regional parties have again a taken a centre stage in the politics of the country. The assumption that the BJP led by Narendra Modi may politically marginalise the regional forces has come under serious doubt after the results of Karnataka assembly polls and the bypolls across the country. They have demonstrated the re-emergence of…