The labor historians of the 1960s were born into the culture of unity forged in the working-class movement’s classical phase, between 1890 and 1945. In one form or another, they told the story of this era, not realizing how radically it might come undone. Gabriel Winant Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Lifeby Tobias… Read More “Hurrah for the Time Man!” Tribute to David Montgomery (1927-2011)
NEW DELHI: Breakthrough Science Society, a collective of scientists and researchers across India, has raised concerns over the deleted ‘Theory of Biological Evolution’ from National Council of Educational Training and Research (NCERT) books for Class 10. Condemning NCERT’s decision, the collective wrote that learning “evolutionary biology is important not just to any subfield of biology, but is… Read More NCERT Books: 1,800 scientists, researchers demand restoration of Darwin’s evolution theory
Olivier Bancoult US military personnel live in my birthplace, the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, but I am not allowed to. Since I was four years old, my people, the Chagossians, have lived in impoverished exile, while the US military has been enjoying the fruits of my homeland. The plight of my people has… Read More The US and UK stole our homes. 50 years on, we’re still being denied justice
According to the ‘basic structure’ doctrine of the Supreme Court put forward in 1973, there are features of the Constitution that are unamendable by Parliament under any circumstances. The doctrine is the only legal defence against parliamentary hegemony and a rewriting of the Constitution. SRIRAM PANCHU; APRAMEYA MANTHENA; VIKAS MURALIDHARAN The Constitution of India is… Read More The ‘Basic Structure’ Doctrine: Defence against Parliamentary Hegemony
First posted November 19, 2011 NB: I wrote this article in the aftermath of the January 2011 judgement by two Supreme Court judges on the murder of Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa in 1999. The debate on religious questions is a secondary one. The first major point of my article is this:… Read More Terrifying implications of the Supreme Court’s Staines Judgement
The regime’s mimicry of Pakistan in rewriting India’s history Mukul Kesavan The decision to allegedly unburden schoolchildren by deleting the Mughal era from their history curriculum has provoked amusing memes: images of the Taj Mahal complete with captions about its mysterious origins and jokes about gallant medieval Rajput rulers routed by invisible armies. These are… Read More Maiming India
by J. BRADFORD DELONG Interpreting politics through the rise of technocracy, morality, and the “web of capital” NB: A thought provoking but to my mind flawed analysis. Our world is run according to the poltical theory of Carl Schmitt, moral principles are subjugated by power; the rule of law replaced by the rule of ideology; and… Read More The Modern World Reconceived
First posted December 10, 2015 April 24, 2015, marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide: how many of us remember? The Ghosts of Ararat After all, who today talks about the murderous dispersal of the Armenians? Adolf Hitler, 1939 Hitler is believed to have said this whilst commenting on the genocide of Armenian residents of the… Read More Suman Keshari: The Ghosts of Ararat
Authors of the revised Class 11 political science textbook have also deleted the fact that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India on the basis of a promise that the State would remain autonomous. MAITRI PORECHA He was a freedom fighter and India’s first Education Minister, but any mention of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad has… Read More Maulana Azad, freedom fighter and India’s first Education Minister removed from NCERT textbook
“What is history for? … It makes us brave!” ADAM TOOZE I’ll never forget this response by my distinguished colleague Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith to one of the “theory and practice” questions with which we used to torture Cambridge undergraduates back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Riley-Smith’s answer resonated with me, precisely for its profound, almost archaic… Read More The courage of Vladimir Kara-Murza
