India

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”.

The term “Green Revolution” refers to the introduction of high-yielding varieties of staple food crops, particularly wheat and rice, into Third World countries, starting in the 1960s. The stated aim was to raise food production to end hunger and prevent revolution.

An unstated secondary aim was to raise the penetration of agribusiness into the Third World. Profits could be made by selling the new varieties of seed and the fertilisers, pesticides and equipment that were indispensable to their success.

As Hurricane Harvey continues to batter Texas and Louisiana in the United States, where nearly 30 people are reported dead, the flooding and landslides that have swept Bangladesh, India and Nepal for weeks have killed more than 1,200 people and displaced millions so far.

Western media, for the most part, has paid little attention to the catastrophic flooding that has swept these South Asian regions.

More than 200,000 protesters marched through Mumbai, disrupting traffic and straining the railway network, to press their demands for quotas in government jobs and education.

Rising unemployment and falling incomes are driving farming communities across India to redouble calls for reserving jobs and education, especially for the underprivileged Maratha community in western India.

Shashi Tharoor’s brilliant speech in 2015 to the Oxford Union on the motion “This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies” went viral, receiving coverage across the world.

Tharoor, an MP for the Indian National Congress, former senior United Nations official, novelist and scholar, has now expanded the argument he made at Oxford into Inglorious Empire.

As the 19th round of trade negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) took place in Hyderabad, India from 17-28 July, trade unions and civil society groups in the country have joined forces to voice concerns over the trade deal, and called for more transparency. 

RCEP is a proposed mega regional free trade agreement (FTA) being negotiated by 16 countries, including ASEAN members and its six FTA partners — namely India, China, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.