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In the distance, 70-year-old Raghunath Das saw red flags marching and heard slogans for a just Bihar. Barefoot, he sprang from his field and ran, heart pounding. He knew it was the padyatra taken out by CPI(ML) Liberation, and he had to reach them to tell what was happening in his village – Singhatiya. Just as he reached the marchers, he looked for CPIML General Secretary Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya and informed him that the land mafia in his village were trying to take away the lands of the poor which were granted to them under bhoodan.

In a misleading and contemptuous remark about the Global Hunger Index Report, BJP leader Smriti Irani who is also the Women and Child Development Minister in the Modi cabinet, has dismissed the Global Hunger Index Report 2023 as having been prepared just by making 3000 random phone calls. Addressing a recent FICCI event in Hyderabad, she said that she did not get a chance to eat due to her hectic schedule that day and had she got a phone call asking if she was hungry she would have definitely said yes to that survey! 

Since May 26, a small town in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district – Purola – has been witnessing several shops belonging to Muslim community being forcefully closed and posters across the town walls warn them to leave the area by June 15 or face consequences. The attacks on shops and forced exodus has already begun, and local administration and police remains a mute spectator.

The Communist Party of India (ML) has asked the Bihar government to conduct a high level prove into the liquor tragedy happened last week in Saran killing more than 70 people. The party said that there are reports of liquor mafia in the state are being protected by vested political interests led by RSS and BJP. Such political and administrative protection should be exposed and brought to justice.

Samastipur district of Bihar is in serious grip of the BJP's hysterical and fanatic forces. Union Minister and BJP leader Nityanand Rai is MP from Ujiarpur Lok Sabha constituency falling in the district, under whose patronage Samastipur has become a centre of oppression of dalits, women and muslims. The government has changed in the state, the BJP has been ousted from power, but the incidents of oppression are not stopping here.

The Garhwal Secretary of CPIML, Indresh Maikhuri, has written to the Chief Election commissioner, Election Commission of India and the Chief Election Officer, Uttarakhand, pointing out that the Uttarakhand Government is blatantly violating the Model Code of Conduct that is now in effect since the elections have been announced, by seeking to transfer teachers who will be the election officers during voting. The letter says, “Casting the model code of conduct to the winds, transfers of government school teachers have been done on a large scale.

A conference was organized on 9 December by the Bihar State ASHA Workers Union (Gope group) at the Pusa PHC complex. ASHA Union Bihar State President Shashi Yadav addressed the conference.

The 3rd Chief Minister in four and a half years of BJP's double engine government in Uttarakhand, Pushkar Singh Dhami has done one job with great asperity: he has pasted the state over with his own hoardings and banners. One hoarding prominent among these boasts that Uttarakhand ranks first in law and order in the Niti Ayog's SDG index.

THE Uttarakhand government has issued an order to stay recruitments in 2020-21. The logic behind this order is the old cliché that the government needs to curtail expenditure. But the truth of these so-called austerity measures is exposed by Principal Secretary Utpal Kumar Singh’s letter of 10 June. In Point No. 2 he says new posts will not be created and appointment of workers on the basis of daily wage or contract will be wholly banned. But in Point No.

1. Mobility and migration have all along been central to the formation and growth of the working class. From villages to towns, from towns to cities and metropolises -  workers have all along been moving and relocating themselves as workers. There are also patterns and levels of migration that can be classified according to distance and duration: inter-district, inter-state and inter-country migration, seasonal and longer-term migration, and so on. But in spite of the pervasive presence of migrant workers, they have remained largely invisible.