Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015)
Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey).
Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst); Ajay Bhardwaj (Vancouver).
Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
NANDIGRAM PRECIPITATES A MINI CRISIS IN THE INDIAN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT
Daya Varma
Fortunately, and somewhat uniquely, the Indian communist movement did not the face the same crisis that befell most other communist parties in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. If anything, its influence increased especially in West Bengal. However, the Communist Party of India –Marxist (CPM), which is the major communist formation and the leading partner of the Left Front Government of West Bengal, and whose support is critical to the survival of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the center, has been challenged by almost every political formation since December 2006, when it attempted acquisition of land in certain areas of Bengal for industrial development. Although CPM abandoned the industrial development program in Nandigram, its opponents would not let it off the hook. November 2007 witnessed a renewed crisis of which the likely victim would not be CPM alone but rather the Indian communist movement as a whole.
UNCALLED FOR CRITICISM OF CHOMSKY, TARIQ ALI, ZINN et al
Daya Varma
It is surprising that the brief note “To our friends in Bengal” by Professor Noam Chomsky and his peers, which appealed for left unity in India in the aftermath of the unfortunate developments in Bengal and expressed solidarity with forcibly dispossessed peasants, received such a scathing attack by the venerable Mahashweta Devi, writer Arundhati Roy and 16 other intellectuals.
NANDIGRAM AND BEYOND
Srinivasan Ramani
The recent events in Nandigram and it’s coverage by a section of media as well as the response by sections of civil society (wrongly mentioned as intellectuals) point out to a grotesque dysfunction of bourgeois democracy, but that is not the concern of this article. This piece will be concerned more about the whys and wherefores of the problem that erupted in West Bengal over the past year, a problem that has not been studied well enough and that has been deliberately misrepresented by voices that professedly speak for variegated ideologies.
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