AFTER 75 years of independence, there is perhaps no other sector in India which is in greater crisis than the agrarian sector. As per the data of the NCRB, over four lakh farmers and agricultural workers have been forced to commit distress suicide in the 25 years from 1995 and 2020, a direct result of neo-liberal policies. Of these peasants, over one lakh have ended their lives in the last eight years of the Modi-led BJP government alone.There is a decrease of 9 million cultivators and an increase of 30 million agricultural workers between 2001-2011.

THE post-colonial state in India had two primary tasks before it: one was to overcome the hegemony of metropolitan capital, so that a development strategy in relative autonomy from imperialism could be pursued; the second was to attack landlordism both to free the agrarian population from its clutches, and to increase agricultural output for rapid industrialisation based on a growing home market.

75TH anniversary of India’s independence, christened by the Modi government as Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, is being mounted as a big campaign focusing on the hoisting of the national flag in every home in the country. For this, the Flag Code of India was amended in December 2021 to permit flags from material other than natural cloth like khadi, cotton and silk to include polyester. Everyone knows who is the biggest polyester producer in the country.

AS India marks its 70th anniversary of independence, it is necessary to recollect that the current political and social battles that are going on in our country emerge from a continuous ideological battle between three distinct visions of what should be the character of the political and social structure of post-independent India that arose during the course of our epic freedom struggle, particularly in the decade of the 1920s. The mainstream Congress vision had articulated that independent India should be a secular democratic Republic.

THOUSANDS of people, all over West Bengal, are now on the streets demanding a thorough probe of the teacher appointment scam and corruption of the TMC ministry. That the scam was conducted in a planned manner by TMC leaders and ministers is out in the open now.The state government has become paranoid. The ruling party is obsessed with shielding Mamata Banerjee. Sixteen people were arrested from south Kolkata even before a scheduled rally began. They included veteran theatre activist Bimal Chakraborty.