Tag: Politics

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T-shirts with images of Mamata Banerjee, Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and logo of CPI (M). Reuters/Rupak De Chowdhuri The party has virtually no opposition in West Bengal. This has led to an entrenchment of violent elements.

Your silence gave him confidence, your conformism fed his conceit, your approval gave him wings. (Co-authored with Rajendran Narayanan) Dear affluent voters of the Prime Minister, We sincerely hope this letter finds you all safe. After all, we are all still mourning the deceased. But we were not actually supposed to be in the house of the dead. We were, after all, living our great dream, sequestered in the designer isolation of…

1 Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969, hereafter Goopy Gyne)and the follow-up fantasy Hirok Rajar Deshe (In the Land of Diamond King, 1980) are two parts of a trilogy of fabular musicals for children.[1] Or so is what they have been mostly, if not always, remembered as. Ray had often felt that films for children made locally were unable to satisfactorily capture their imagination. More often than not, those films sentimentalized childhood, or treated them as part of a sealed…

Photo by Monthaye/Unsplash (Co-authored with Rajendran Narayanan) How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock. Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War In The Shock Doctrine, renowned journalist Naomi Klein presents a searing account of how disasters were used as cover to steamroll market fundamentalism by authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina, among others. The title alludes to the practice of psychiatric shock therapy used in the early twentieth century. She calls this disaster…

An installation by Sudipta Das. Photo by author. West Bengal must choose between BJP’s tall claims, Left’s cluelessness and TMC’s governance by gamble. The elections in Bengal seem to have become something of a national pastime. I cannot recall a period when the national media has spent this much time pondering over Bengal’s future. This must surely be an anomaly. The word future in the context of Bengal challenges even the most resolute. The once-mighty Bengal’s perceived fall from grace…

An etching that puns on the Kali figure. There cannot be a three-way election in 2021. That would mean an advantage for BJP, as it will cannibalise on the factionalism in the TMC and on the irrelevance of the CPIM. The dictionary meaning of blunderbuss is two-fold. The more archaic meaning stands for a gun with a short, large barrel, to be fired only at close range. The second meaning refers to an action lacking subtlety and precision. Either…

Photo by Md Shairaf on Unsplash AAP’s post-ideological vanity is far more damaging when it stands on the face of a gargantuan right-wing machinery at these times. The Aam Aadmi Party’s blitheness about the Delhi riots has tempered the trust of much of India, except perhaps those who thrive in a bloodbath. So has its decision to allow prosecution against JNU students in a four-year-old manufactured case of sedition. In its defence of the first case, the party…

রাজধানীতে ভোট ঘোষণার পর জানলাম, সরকারি বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে অধ্যাপনার সূত্রে নির্বাচনে একটি বিশেষ ভূমিকা পালন করতে হবে—একজ়িকিউটিভ ম্যাজিস্ট্রেটের ভূমিকা। এই কাজের সূত্রে রাজনীতি নামক বস্তুটির একটা ‘রিংসাইড ভিউ’ পাওয়ার সুযোগ হল। নির্বাচনের কাজে বেরিয়ে তাই দেখার কৌতূহল হল যে আপ-এর মতো একটা আঞ্চলিক ছোট দল কী ভাবে বিপুল ধনী এবং সর্বশক্তিমান একটি সাম্প্রদায়িক মেশিনের সঙ্গে পাল্লা দিচ্ছে। অরবিন্দ কেজরীবালের স্বচ্ছ ভাবমূর্তি তো ছিলই, সঙ্গে ছিল গত পাঁচ বছরের কাজের খতিয়ান। দিল্লিতে যাঁরা বসবাস করেন তাঁরা একমত হবেনই, আপ শুধু যে বেশ…

Protest drawing of a student at Shaheen Bagh, December 2019. Photo by author. The Young Against The New Partition: Why The CAA & NRC Are The Biggest Tests For Independent India Several public intellectuals, commentators and those who contribute to public opinion in India have compared the current political crisis in India as the biggest test facing us since Independence. At the heart of this crisis is the newly-minted Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which proposes to give sanctuary in…