ON December 8, continuing the tradition of the Indo Canadian Workers Association (ICWA), annual calendar was released at Surrey, Canada in Strawberry Hill Library. The calendar was dedicated to the Gadar movement heroes who laid down their lives for the freedom movement of India and to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre which took place 100 years ago. Observing the centenary of the massacre, in which nearly 1,000 innocent people were killed, the ICWA held a large meeting in which people from all walks of life participated.

The All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), in a statement issued on December 18, has strongly condemned the totally unwarranted sexist remarks recently made by Army chief Bipin Rawat on the question of women being inducted into combat roles in the army. While AIDWA is wholly opposed to the brazen militarism that high-ups in the army are found to voice frequently in public in recent times, it is even more obnoxious to find them exposing with impunity their utterly insulting and warped attitude not only to women aspiring towards a military career but to women in general.

THE three Hindi heartland states – Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan – have rejected the BJP in varying degrees in the elections to the state assemblies. These elections show that even with money power and its electoral machinery including its formidable WhatsApp reach, BJP is vulnerable to peoples’ discontent. People rejected BJP’s false claims of development and their hate campaign in good, old fashioned ways – through talking to each other in homes, tea shops and in every day conversations with friends.

THE Indo-Pacific has emerged as the centre of gravity of global geopolitics. This year’s APEC conference in Papua New Guinea did not produce a joint communique because of the growing Sino-US tensions. The Trump administration is pressurising China on trade and technology issues. The United States is relentlessly pursuing its strategic agenda to retain its dominance of the Indo-Pacific region and ensure that the Chinese growing economic power does not catapult it to command the region.

FRANCE, for the last four weeks, has been witnessing one of the major political demonstrations since 1968, ie, almost after fifty years. While the 1968 demonstrations were hailed as the ‘student demonstrations’ that initiated a popular movement against the then governments in many of the capitalist States, there is a substantial difference with what is now taking place in France. The present protests are mainly led by the toiling classes in the country, chiefly those from the rural regions, with students too joining them at a later stage.