India was brought to a standstill for two days on January 8 and 9 as an estimated 200 million people nationwide took strike action against the right-wing government, Morning Star Online said.
Ten unions affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) called the action after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government rejected their 12-point charter of demands, which included a rise in the minimum wage and measures to boost the economy.
Sucheta De is a former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Student Union President and current President of the All India Students Association (AISA).
She spoke to Green Left Weekly in April, 2018 about the reactionary policies of the Modi government against women, students and the poor.
Interviewer: Tony Iltis, for Green Left Weekly.
Organised under the banners of All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) and All India Agricultural Workers’ Union (AIAWU) of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), thousands of farmers began marching from Singur towards Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, on November 27.
The march culminated in front of Governor Raj Bhavan’s house the next day to demand cultivable lands be returned to the farmers.
Flooding due to monsoon rains in mid-August has devastated the southern Indian state of Kerala. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands evacuated.
In the August 19 statement below the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation accuses India’s hard right BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of deliberate neglect of flood victims.
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Indigenous women in north-eastern India are calling on the Meghalaya state government to block a bill that would deny them rights, including the ability to inherit land if they marry outside their tribe.
Khasi women are the latest to join a growing movement in the country challenging discriminatory legislation and practices.
The bill was passed last month by the tribe’s governing body, which said it is a measure to protect the group’s indigenous identity.
As cases of grave sexual violence against women continue to make headlines in India, another grim story has surfaced. A recently published study found that sex discrimination in the South Asian country kills more than 200,000 girls under the year of five-years-old annually.
Concerns over the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of the Hindu nationalist BJP government continuing in power into the indefinite future were partially allayed by the December elections in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.
Modi was Gujarat’s longest ruling chief minister and used his “Gujarat model” as the vehicle of his rise to power. This model was based on large-scale handouts of land, public assets and subsidies to corporate houses in return for media hype and enthusiastic endorsement by an increasingly shrill, intolerant and hectoring corporate media.
A sea of red swept the Indian state of Maharastra as tens of thousands of farmers joined the Long March to demand agrarian reform, with protesters reaching Mumbai, India’s financial capital. In response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has agreed to resolve the farmers' issues within six months.
About five million women went on strike and marched in Spain on March 8 in support of a call for an international women’s strike to mark International Women’s Day and demand a just and egalitarian society, TeleSUR English said that day.
Protesters gathered in New Delhi, India, to protest against the 2018 national budget released by the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party government, labelling it “anti-people” and “anti-labour”.
