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Free-market globalization is strengthening that which is barbaric and regressive and smashing what is beautiful,” Examples, are the death of traditional handicrafts, such as pottery, and the loss of languages. At the same time, horrible institutions such as caste-based village councils are being bolstered as a backlash against the rural displacement caused by globalization.

BRICS and the SCO are the two largest independent international organizations to develop over the past decade. What role these new organizations will play internationally is not clear. Certainly sanction regimens will be harder to maintain because the SCO and the BRICS create alternatives. South Africa, for instance, announced that it would begin buying Iran oil in the next few months, an important breach in the sanctions against Iran.

The march was against a massive police crack down on a peaceful student protest on Jadavpur University campus, one of leading universities in the state. The students were sitting-in at their Vice Chancellor’s office, refusing to let him go, until he promised an independent inquiry commission into a case of sexual assault on campus. Their rallying cry was “hok kolorob” or let there be uproar.

Far from offering a new or original vision of collective good, the Hindu right-wing, which is Modi's political home, peddles a recycled imperial understanding of India and is parasitic upon some of its worst civilisational assumptions and the repressive institutions the British Empire bequeathed its former possession. These include laws criminalising 'sedition' and criminalising homosexuality, both of which are embraced enthusiastically by the Hindu right.

Reader Comments - Edward Snowden, NSA and NBC; Police Crimes; U.S. Cuba Policy; Tiananmen Anniversary; Ralph Fasanella's Art; Prisons and Solidarity Confinement; Workers and Labor; Taxes and Economic Growth; Carbon Pollution; New Populism; Sexual Harassment; Sexual assault of women protestors in India; Les Orear - R.I.P.

For the first time since 1984, a single party–the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi–achieved an outright majority. Modi’s party garnered 282 seats in the Lok Sabha, while the outgoing Congress Party managed to retain a mere 44 seats. Jadaliyya asked Vijay Prashad, professor of International Studies at Trinity College and the outgoing Edward W. Said Chair in American Studies at the American University of Beirut, to comment on this election...

In India, even as prominent left parties falter, radicalism persists.

Democracy is not only the right to vote: participation, social justice and equality are fundamental to the democratic ideal and are widely absent throughout India.