Gathering in Kolkata on Monday 12th September a joint press meeting was held by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), the All India Trade Union Congress and other trade union bodies, where Kali Ghosh (State General Secretary of CITU) and Ramen Pandey (INTUC State General Secretary) denounced the Anti-Labour policies of the Trinamool Congress lead government of West Bengal.

Societies seething with discontent and deprivation erupt in most peculiar ways. In India’s egregiously unequal society, the recent upheaval, if at all it can be called that, around the right-wing conservative social activist Anna Hazare shows the malaise that has set in in this largest democracy in the world with one of the fastest growing economies.

The Indian economy has undergone a long period of high and sustained growth. It remains a country of huge contradictions, with immense polarisation of wealth. And yet, in spite of all the propaganda about the state being “bad”, without it Indian capitalism could not have developed as it has.

The drastic defeat of the Left Front, led by the CPI (M), in the state elections of west Bengal, the results of which were announced on May 13th, is a significant turning point in the left politics of the south Asian subcontinent.

The famous Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, once wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. In the South Asian subcontinent the threat of war and the process of peace are also used as a device of deception for domestic consumption.

For more than two decades society has been under a kind of Orwellian spell where almost everything written or said in the mainstream media and intellectual circles in fact means its opposite. Clichés like “end of history”, “socialism has failed”, “capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty”, etc., reek of a moral and ethical decline of the system and society as a whole.

The corridors of power from Srinagar to Delhi and from Islamabad to Washington have been shaken by the uprising of Kashmiri youth. For the past ten weeks, major parts of the valley have seen widespread protests, strikes and unrest. Everyday life has been brought to a standstill in most districts including Srinagar by this forceful movement. And the attempts to crush the movement on the part of the state apparatus are adding fuel to the fire.

We publish a comment by a Pakistani Marxist on the situation in India today. He outlines the appalling levels of poverty, highlighting that this is getting worse, not better, as the gap between rich and poor gets ever wider. The answer is to be found in the unity of workers across the whole of the South Asian subcontinent in the struggle for a socialist federation.

Several tragic accidents have taken place at the Delhi Metro railway building site, involving the death of a number of workers. This has now turned into a full-scale scandal, revealing collusion, in cutting corners and turning a blind eye to the application of safety regulations, between government officials and the companies involved. It reveals how barbaric the capitalist system is.

A case of rape and murder of two young women in the Kashmiri town of Shopian at the hands of a group of police officers, and the subsequent attempted cover-up has brought to the surface the simmering anger of the masses.

The recent elections in India have been hailed by the bourgeois media as a turn a way from the left. This is not the case at all. What is true is that the policies of the two main Communist parties have been such that the masses could not identify in them a clear alternative to Congress. The Communist parties paid a dear price for this. Now the task is to learn from this experience and break with class-collaborationist policies.

Twenty five years have passed since more than 3000 innocent people of the minority Sikh community were brutally massacred, their properties burnt down, ransacked and looted and their women gang raped by the mob in Delhi and elsewhere in India, during the anti-Sikh pogrom of November 1984. Many of those responsible still hold important political positions. The tactic of "Divide and Rule" is still kept in reserve by the Indian ruling class, as this case shows.

The throwing of shoes at political leaders has become very fashionable lately as this report reveals. In some cases so concerned have the organisers of rallies become that they have forced the participants to remove their shoes and leave them outside!