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Showing posts from March, 2019

VOICES AND THE UNVOICED: WOMEN AND THE TELANGANA PEASANT INSURRECTION by Ananyo Chakrabarty

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The Telangana armed rebellion (1946-51) can be rightfully termed as the most adventurous experiment of the militant peasantry in modern India. It was part of the two-cratered volcano, the other contemporaneous explosion being in Bengal in form of the Tebhaga Movement. Spanning five years, the movement in Telangana, though less widespread than the former, was the longest insurrection of its kind. The Communist Party of India (largely claimed to have) led the mobilized agrarian masses into land seizure and distribution, forming village soviets and later into a systematic guerrilla campaign, against the Nizams (hereditary monarchs of the princely state of Hyderabad) in the initial stage and then against the Indian Government which annexed the state in 1948 after the Indian liberation from colonial rule. The struggle necessarily won important victories for the peasants, with the abolition of the feudal land revenue system, and peasants (though not all-inclusively) given land owners

OCCUPY THE STREETS by Sujato Datta

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Dystopia is no longer the imaginative tool it used to be. It is a reality that is growing stronger everyday. Totalitarianism has become the nature of the state. However it is no longer in its tangible form. In fact, in its tangible form it can hardly be called totalitarianism. It is authoritarianism or fascism at the best. Totalitarianism occurs on the level of ideas.The left and right being garbs, the state is necessarily totalitarian. Time and again it has assaulted ideas and planted manufactured narratives. In doing so they have availed what was our best defence against them - history. Far right governments be it in India, Israel or Italy use history as a justification for atrocities against communities. They use history as a justification for fueling war. They use it to make you think that war is a necessity. Israel, a racist state and an illegitimate state(though all states are) based on Zionism, has cited the atrocities of Holocaust as justification for a Jewish state using wh