http://sanhati.com Fighting neoliberalism in Bengal Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:11:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 en http://sanhati.com/articles/2711/ http://sanhati.com/articles/2711/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:50:01 +0000 http://sanhati.com/articles/2711/ http://sanhati.com/articles/2711/feed/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2710/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2710/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:05:55 +0000 http://sanhati.com/tweet/2710/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2710/feed/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2709/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2709/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:21:42 +0000 http://sanhati.com/tweet/2709/ http://sanhati.com/tweet/2709/feed/ http://sanhati.com/articles/2708/ http://sanhati.com/articles/2708/#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:47:03 +0000 http://sanhati.com/articles/2708/ http://sanhati.com/articles/2708/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2692/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2692/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 04:00:07 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2692/ [H]e (steel baron Lakshmi Mittal’s scion Aditya Mittal) recalled his visit to a plant site in China. A party secretary had accorded him the “red-carpet treatment”, even giving Mittal’s car exclusive access to a highway that hadn’t yet been inaugurated. “Then I get to the plant site, but I don’t see any land. I see houses, lots of houses — a village. And I say, ‘Where’s the land?’ And the party secretary says, ‘Right here. In 90 days, everyone will be gone. - www.dnaindia.com/, 03.02.07 ]]> http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2692/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2693/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2693/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:55:57 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2693/ Raavan, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Vikram, Ravi Kishan and Govinda has received generally bad reviews and is a failure at the box office as well. I hear that the Tamil version is far superior, but not having seen it, I cannot be the judge of that. At least for the Hindi version there seems to be a consensus that apart from Santosh Sivan’s cinematography there is not much in the movie to write home about. It also suffers from some common Bollywood flaws such as really bad acting and complete lack of attention to details. Yet, from the social and political standpoint the film’s grafting of the Ramayana on the current conflict between adivasis and the Indian state is well worth thinking about. It is in line with a long tradition of political writing and thought in India that has offered an alternative to the Brahminical version of Indian history. In this review we explore this dimension of the movie.]]> http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2693/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2687/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2687/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:55:21 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2687/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2687/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2684/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2684/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:54:21 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2684/ Click here for a list of occupied schools in Jharkhand and West Bengal [PDF, English]» Sixty-two years ago, at the midnight of 14th August, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru declared that finally India would redeem its tryst with destiny, and the country would awake to life and freedom. The Constituent Assembly, where he spoke these words, went on to draft a constitution which enshrined the fundamental rights of India’s citizens, including Article 21A, which guaranteed free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years. To support, and strengthen, this fundamental right, the Indian parliament passed the Right of children to free and compulsory education act, 2009, commonly referred to as the Right to Education act with much fanfare. While the India of multinationals and multibillionaires seem to have gone ahead to fulfill its tryst with destiny, and successive governments claim to be building a “knowledge-based economy”, the adivasi and dalit children, inhabiting the regions of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and the other Indian states which are currently the site of the armed offensive by the state, called Operation Green Hunt, seemed to be headed towards another destiny. For, they are being denied their fundamental right to education, as their schools have been occupied by the security forces of the state.]]> http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2684/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2698/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2698/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:53:43 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2698/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2698/feed/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2681/ http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2681/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:52:57 +0000 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2681/ Introduction In the backdrop of the growing peoples' movement in the country against the logic of neoliberal capitalist development, Basole and Basu (2009) [available here] had revisited the “mode of production” debate of the 1970s to understand the evolution of relations of production and modes of surplus extraction in India over the last five decades. Using aggregate level data for agriculture and informal industry, which together employ about 94 percent of Indian’s working population, the paper had highlighted key aspects of contemporary Indian capitalism. The analysis was meant to link up with and inform attempts at radically restructuring Indian society in a socialist direction. Though Basole and Basu (2009) had used several case studies related to the unorganized/informal industrial sector to complement the story emerging from aggregate level data, the paper had failed to do a similar analysis of the agrarian sector. The major lacuna of the paper, therefore, was its failure to draw on micro/village level studies of agrarian change to supplement aggregate level trends derived from sample survey and census data. In this article, we take the first step towards addressing that shortcoming by summarizing crucial aspects of the dynamics of agrarian change in rural Bihar over the last few decades based on three village-level studies. ]]> http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2681/feed/