The growing saffronisation of the Bengali public sphere, evident from the violent celebrations of Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti in West Bengal, has raised the possibility of a murky manoeuvring of communal politics before the 2019 general elections. With the left and liberal public spaces having failed at addressing crucial socio-religious questions and the far right misappropriating and usurping these spaces, comprehensive critical engagement with the growing presence of religion in the public sphere is necessary.
Nabarun Bhattacharya's prose of counter-insurgency would continue to provide the necessary grammar of resistance to an otherwise somnolent and complaisant literary establishment in Bengal.
Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas by Barabara Harriss-White with Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash, and Kaushal Vidyarthee, Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2014; pp 189, Rs 1,300.
The Aam Aadmi Party's recent fight with the media has inaugurated and deepened the idea of the mediatised labour as expounded by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their manifesto Declaration written in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement and Arab Spring, events that used the media and yet did not collude with the logic of global capital. AAP has not just opened a new space and vocabulary in Indian politics but its tirades against local exploitation and global capital have changed the grammar of political and social ideology in spite of its recent defeats.
Alpa Shah's review of Arundhati Roy's, Broken Republic ("Eco- incarceration? 'Walking with the Comrades' ", EPW, 26 May 2012) missed the central axiom of Roy's ethico-political argument against state coercion and neo-liberal totalitarianism.
