Below we reproduce the People’s Democracy editorial published on the 40th anniversary of India’s Independence.ON August 15, forty years ago, India attained political independence after 190 years of colonial rule. This momentous development came as a result of the heroic sacrifices that the people of this country had made during their long drawn-out liberation struggle. This was a significant achievement of the defeat of fascism, when world imperialism proved utterly incapable of contending with the rising upsurge of people of the colonial countries.

THE CPI(M) in Andaman & Nicobar Islands will carry out a massive campaign and agitation on people’s issues in the coming months.  A decision in this regard was taken in the meeting of the state organising committee of the Party held at Shaheed Bhavan, Port Blair on July 9, 2022, in presence of G Ramakrishnan, Polit Bureau Member and SujanChakraborthy, Central Committee Member. D Ayyappan, secretary of the committee presented the report of the action plan in the meeting.

IN 1959, one of the revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Haydée Santamaria, a hundred years old this year, arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana, Cuba. This building, the revolutionaries decided, would be committed to the promotion of Latin American art and culture and it would become – eventually – a beacon for the progressive transformation of the hemisphere’s cultural world. Renamed the Casa de las Américas, the home of the Americas, it would become the heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico.

EIGHT months after the victorious suspension of the historic farmers’ struggle against the BJP central government’s three farm laws, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) revived itself in its national meeting held at Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh on July 3, 2022. There had been two national meetings earlier, one at the Singhu border on January 15, and the other at Delhi on March 14. However, both these meetings were marked by controversy, especially over the decision of some of the Punjab kisan organisations forming two political parties and contesting the Punjab state assembly elections.

THE integration of the Global South has always worried the West. In the 1970s when the poor nations joined hands to demand a New International Economic Order (NIEO), the West got into action to divide the south-south solidarity. A three-way split was engineered – the oil producing third world countries in the middle east were clubbed together as relatively well-off nations and separated from the much larger third-world composed of developing and underdeveloped nations. Similarly, relatively big countries like China, India and a few others were segregated from very poor countries.