On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed…
At the outskirts of Tokyo, beyond light manufacturing plants and small farms, sits an incongruous set of buildings. There is a traditional Japanese veranda near an attractive house, besides which sits a large blue building. In that building, on two floors, hang the soul of Japan – the paintings by Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki…
Being a journalist is a dangerous business. It is not dangerous to be a stenographer – to be someone who regurgitates the views of the powerful. A real journalist is someone who gets beneath the stories that surrounds us, who seeks answers to difficult questions, who won’t leave a story because to do so would…
In the Outskirts of Delhi. It is impossible to go anywhere in India without being confronted with the terrible enormity of hunger. One in two Indians goes to sleep at night without a full stomach. At the outskirts of Delhi, which was once farmland, shacks house those who work across the city. They…
The BJP and its ally – the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) – have won the 2018 elections to the Tripura state legislature. The alliance of the BJP and the IPFT will now form a government. The Left It is the first time in twenty-five years that Tripura, a state of four million…
This is our ninth story for our #OctoberRevolutionSeries, a series we began in October 2017 to remember the centenary of the Russia Revolution. The first is an excerpt from Cecilia Bobrovskaya's memoirs; the second is from an essay by Prabir Purkayastha; the third is our inaugral bookend by Githa Hariharan on Sevtlana Alexievich's novel Second Hand Time; and the fourth is a conversation with…
Building Alternatives: The Story of India's Oldest Construction Workers' Union, by T M Thomas Isaac and Michelle Williams, was published by LeftWord Books in 2017 Misery greets the planet. Social inequality has reached unbelievable levels – where five individuals hold as much wealth as the bottom half of society. Climate change – driven by capitalist expansionism…
Continuing our focus on independent publising in India, we talk to Vijay Prashad, the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. LeftWord is a New Delhi based publishing house that seeks to "reflect the views of the left in India and South Asia". More from this series: Samik Bandyopadhyay and Sudeshna Banerjee in conversation with Souradeep Roy about the…
Nelobileralism is a cultural project as much as it is an economic one, says Professor Vijay Prashad. Endemic joblessness, the culture of entrepreneurship and attack on free speech are integral to this project. Read Aijaz Ahmed's India: Liberalism Democracy and the Exteme Right