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”.
Crop varieties have been selected and reproduced over thousands of years by farmers, creating great diversity. India, for example, used to have 200,000 varieties of rice. Seeds were kept each year for replanting and exchanging in what was a free or low-cost system for many farmers.
More than 100,000 people took part in a three-day sit-in outside the national parliament in New Delhi over November 9-11 against the “anti-worker, anti-farmer and anti-national policies” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, Inuth.com said November 13.
Ten national trade unions and many other workers’ organisations from across India took part to campaign for a 12-point workers’ rights charter.
Police in the southern Indian state of Kerala unleashed brutal force against people protesting against the proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline of Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL) at Mukkom, near Calicut, CounterCurrents.org said on November 2. Dozens of protesters were injured.
The demonstrators blocked rural roads with burning tyres and threw stones at police vehicles. Tension prevailed in the area as the police resorted to a baton-charge and fired tear gas shells to disperse the crowd. Media representatives were injured in the police action.
United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss China’s growing influence in Asia on October 25.
Tillerson recently gave a speech regarding the US’s desire to "dramatically deepen" ties with India to combat what he described as a negative Chinese influence in the region.
Ahead of the crucial Gujarat elections, the chinks in the propaganda armour of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development continue to get brutally exposed. Indeed, the popular narrative on development that has emerged from within Gujarat – where Modi was chief minister prior to becoming PM – and that has taken social media by storm is that “vikas gando thayo chhe” – “development has gone crazy”.
