'Left’s dark money network...': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKw15wIRea8 Tyler O’Neil  books Wokeness on  USAID’s ‘long history’ with George Soros 

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/lefts-dark-money-network-tyler-oneil-exposes-usaids-long-history-with-george-soros/videoshow/118605540.cms 

U.S. Congressional meeting of the special committee on government efficiency, titled "The Last America: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World." In this session, O'Neil claimed that the Open Society Foundations and USAID worked together to support the East West Management Institute, which received $31.2 million in USAID funding. He noted that these funds were allegedly used to target and undermine the democratic leader in Albania.

 Farmers march to Mumbai, demand scrapping of Shaktipeeth project https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/maharashtra/farmers-march-to-mumbai-demand-scrapping-of-shaktipeeth-project/article69322234.ece   The proposed Nagpur to Goa Shaktipeeth Expressway project, approved in 2023, has created a stir among the farmers across the State as the project entails acquiring land from farmers in several districts passing between Nagpur and Goa.. thousands of farmers from 12 districts marched to Azad Maidan in Mumbai on Wednesday (March 12, 2025) opposing the Shaktipeeth Expressway, a pet project of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Farmers’ representative and former MP Raju Shetti accused the government of corruption involved in the ₹86,000 crore project, asking “if the project is about connecting the temples of Maharashtra, then why the road is being taken to Goa.”

Maharashtra's Shaktipeeth Expressway: Balancing Growth with Farmers' Concerns  https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/business/3305471-maharashtras-shaktipeeth-expressway-balancing-growth-with-farmers-concerns

Nehru's Vision and India  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0EFT5CjFDM   Aditya Mukherjee  Manthan India  how many critical aspects of the vision of our freedom struggle, called the ‘Idea of India’ stand compromised today. In that context the attempt will be to go back to Nehru’s legacy

https://www.youtube.com/c/ManthanIndia

This abiding concern for the most precise label -- "fascist", "proto-fascist", "semi-fascist" or "neo-fascist" -- to me, appears to be a bit funny. It, perhaps, emanates from a certain type of intellectual laziness and the fond belief that once the right label is determined, the right solution is very much available on the shelf, if only we care to search. The holy texts do offer solutions to all problems, but for that we have to find the right label.

For them, Lenin's advice: concrete analysis of the concrete problem. Even Italian Fascism and German Nazism were not exactly the same. Mussolini was captured by his country people and treated like a despised criminal. Hitler committed suicide to avoid being captured by the Allies. He was perhaps still popular among the Germans. Anyway, both had to be defeated by external forces. They were, to be sure, not defeated by any "Popular Front".
Right here in India, the authoritarian rule of Indira Gandhi was ousted electorally by a mishmash coalition of hard Right, Centre and Pink Left -- backed by the bulk of the Reds. Not exactly a "Popular Front".

The issues of the moment need to be clearly identified. The threats and opportunities properly diagnosed.
Far more crucial than an endless chase for the right label. Sukla Sen, <https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15UipcT8sQ>

India’s left-right centenary

Jawed Naqvi

COMMUNIST parties in India are quibbling over the characteristics of fasc​ism, wondering if Antonio Gramsci’s views on the scourge from his Italian experience are relevant to the challenge of vacating the threat in the country. The debate comes at a time for the communist movement as it marks 100 years of its transformation into an organised Communist Party of India (CPI) in the leather and textiles working class hub of Kanpur in 1925.

Not entirely by coincidence, the seeds of India’s organised fascist movement also sprouted the same year with the founding of the Hindu revanchist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its political branch, the BJP, is ruling India for a third consecutive five-year term under the dubious leadership of Narendra Modi. The RSS was inspired by both Mussolini and Hitler who its leaders had described as the model for dealing with India’s minorities. It’s thus the centenary year of India’s left-right battles, though tragically for the left, the journey also witnessed moments of self-harming collusion with the right.

In the first general elections in 1952, communists became the main opposition to Nehru’s Congress. Since then, they have had their electoral highs and lows. In the recent polls, they were reduced to the margins, not far from being rendered negligible in the electoral fray that shores up Indian democracy. Their vote share against Nehru’s 50 per cent in India’s first elections was 3.29pc, but they had 16 seats over the next opposition group, the socialists, who won 12. By a quirk of India’s electoral system, although the socialists had fewer seats than the communists, they had a higher vote percentage of 10.59pc. In the 2024 elections, three communist parties won two seats each, none in West Bengal, with a joint national vote share of an embarrassing 2pc.

On their day, the British beat Indian communists and jailed their leaders, most notably following the infamous Meerut conspiracy case when its Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders were charged with plotting to overthrow British rule. The Hindu right at the time had become apologists for colonialism. Arun Shourie in a new book on V.D. Savarkar, author of the Hindutva doctrine, describes Savarkar’s numerous apologies to the British from his jail, offering to work for them if released. Hindutva’s hatred of Gandhi was not less than that of Nehru. On his part, Nehru instinctively assessed Savarkar’s Hindutva and its kindred spirit, the RSS, as a graver challenge to secular India than the communists.

The colonial experience spurred communist partisans to launch a gallant but eventually botched liberation war in 1946 in the province of Telangana, part of the Nizam’s feudal territory. Many poets, writers and actors cut their teeth in the romance of the peasant struggle against feudalism. The CPI spawned a cultural renaissance of progressive theatre, cinema and literature in the movement. The Telangana uprising ended tamely in 1951, and the party split in the 1960s in keeping with a familiar communist habit.

Impelled by the Telangana fiasco, the focus of communist leaders gravitated to electoral politics. It resulted in the world’s first elected communist government in Kerala. Since then, most communist leaders have embraced the provinces of Bengal and Kerala as their hub for struggle, where electoral success was more readily attainable.

When a political contingency offered communists a chance to rule the country, not just their two provinces, and have their leader Jyoti Basu as prime minister following inconclusive elections in 1996, the party developed cold feet. An Urdu verse aptly describes their terror: “Woh ghareeb dil ko sabaq miley ki khushi ke naam se dar gaya/ Kabhi tum ne hans ke jo baat ki to hamara chehra utar gaya” (Courting adversity and fear of failure/ I was pulverised by the prospect of happier tidings.) Basu would describe the party’s refusal to accept the challenge as a historic blunder.

A desirable quest for the increasingly marginalised communist parties at the current juncture, to the ordinary Indian’s mind, should be to help re-establish the secular democracy the nation had set out to be. In seeking this goal, the communists would be required to work, kicking or screaming, with willing bourgeois allies who are numerically stronger than them. Naturally, the more radical ideologues would for their own legitimate reasons see this as an embarrassment if not an outright betrayal of their elusive revolution. Do they have a better plan?

The current discussion on fascism arose from the reluctance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI-M) to accept that the country is already in the throes of the scourge under Modi’s regime. Instead, ahead of its party congress in April, it speaks of features of neo-fascism as stalking the country — features.

The CPI-M has lost power in the tribal state of Tripura to the BJP, West Bengal to Mamta Banerjee with room for the BJP to grow stronger. It is tenuously holding on to power in Kerala where its challenger, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress expects to win the state polls in mid-2026. Gandhi is working hard to defeat the twin challenges of BJP’s oligarchic rule and against its polarising hostility towards Sikhs, Muslims and Christians and less open support for assaulting Dalits.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), a smaller but more militant offshoot of India’s communist struggles, posits that the country is likely facing full-blown fascism, and that it is time to collectively mint a strategy to combat and defeat it. Being equidistant from the BJP and the Congress was once the CPI-M’s convenient stand. It allowed the BJP’s vertical rise to power. How long would the CPI-M continue to fight INDIA allies in West Bengal and Kerala and hope at the same time to join an opposition campaign to defeat fascism, or by whatever name it chooses to call the challenge? A hundred years of communist movement in India should have given the party all the time it ever needed to learn how not to score self-goals.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ankita_Bhandari  

https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/A-Fact-Finding-Report-on-the-Murder-of-Ankita-Bhandari.pdf 

(Open Letter of Supreme Court Advocate Colin Gonsalves On Supreme Court's Refusal to Entertain Petition for CBI Enquiry into murder of Ankita, a young girl who was killed while employed in a hotel run by a BJP leader's close relative in Dehradun.)

I’m sorry, Ankita that your case in the Supreme Court seeking a CBI investigation into your murder was disposed of and we have not yet managed to catch the main culprit. I’m sorry Ashutosh, fearless journalist and Petitioner before the Court that you have had to suffer victimisation for investigating this case and had FIRs filed against you and also suffered the victimisation of your wife by way of her transfer. I’m sorry Soni Devi, for the death of your darling daughter by a VIP who asked for “special services” from Ankita, a young girl working in the hotel. Her refusal led to her murder. 

Read more …

Modi Govt's Silence on US Tariffs; India Attacks UN Report on Bangladesh on Grounds That Apply to Itself; Trump Making Nuclear Proliferation Great Again  https://www.theindiacable.com/p/modi-govts-silence-on-us-tariffs  While China, Canada, and Mexico have swiftly retaliated with counter-tariffs and WTO complaints, India has remained eerily quiet despite the obvious injustice of a fully developed, wealthy country like the US expecting tariff equalisation with a poorer nation like India across all product lines. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, currently in Washington for trade talks, has yet to issue a response, let alone a strong one. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, when asked about the tariffs in London at an event organised by Chatham House think tank, sidestepped the issue entirely, vaguely pointing to Goyal’s ongoing discussions

The CHILLING Reason Why Elon Musk Wants Your Data: Former Federal Worker Fired by DOGE Speaks Out https://youtu.be/InSgV9nQSjs  

Francesca and Wajahat break down the latest DOGE news as Elon Musk continues his takeover of the US government. 

Plus, the two speak with Jonathan Kamens, former Cybersecurity Lead for VA.gov at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who was fired by DOGE in February

https://oralhistorynarmada.in/ 

Early History https://oralhistorynarmada.in/early-history-of-the-movement/ The early history and evolution of the Narmada struggle against the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) has been put up here through the interviews of 11 senior people involved in the struggle. It is followed by a summary of the early history and evolution of the Narmada struggle in text format.

Impact of Submergence   https://oralhistorynarmada.in/impact-of-submergence-and-displacement/The impacts on people, environment, archaeology, etc due to submergence by the Sardar Sarovar dam is explained here through select video clips from interviews of 7 Project Affected Persons and/or active members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

 Strategies of the Narmada Bachao Andolan https://oralhistorynarmada.in/strategies-of-the-movement/
The interviews put out in this section offer comments, insights and narrations of personal experiences related to the many strategies and tactics adopted by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) during its more than three decades as a mass resistance movement.
Women Leaders of NBA https://oralhistorynarmada.in/women-leaders-of-nba/ 
The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has always had women, both from within the affected communities and activists from outside the valley at its forefront. This section carries interviews of senior women leaders of the NBA.

Life by Narmada https://oralhistorynarmada.in/life-by-the-narmada/ 
The stalwarts of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and oustees of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) themselves share in the audio-video clips the many facets of the mighty Narmada River before the building of the Sardar Sarovar dam.

Life by Narmada Short Clips