Emergency

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India by Mytheli Sreenivas, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021; pp 274, `2,250.

The principles and programmes that the socialists formulated over 75 years ago still seem relevant in today's India. Perhaps, if they had not splintered into so many factions and so frequently, they might have succeeded in implementing some of their plans and may have had greater impact in resolving part of the inequalities and inequities in our society.

Remembering M M Thomas, a man who believed that every revolutionary situation was created by the relation between power as political expression towards justice, the opposition of the counter-revolutionary force of the established order and the misdirection and corruption of it leading to the betrayal of the end of justice by the revolutionary forces.

With the taint of the Gandhi assassination, the RSS was truly a political pariah. But after the Emergency, acquiring political power came within reach. The fortunes of secularism, and of Hindutva, were decisively changed thereafter. These changes need not be irrevocable, but they require to be understood.

For the second time since 1990 an emergency has been declared in Nepal. However, unlike the first time, when the declaration of emergency preceded widespread changes in the country’s political set-up, this time it seeks to equip the government with extra-constitutional powers to wage an all-out campaign against the Maoist rebels, whose “people’s war” against the government and the constitutional monarchy since 1996 has claimed over 1,700 lives. In the past one week alone nearly 250 people, mainly policemen, have been killed in incidents of Maoist violence. This follows the end of the ceasefire and the petering out of the several rounds of talks between the Deuba government and the Maoists.