THIS being the year end issue, People’s Democracy greets all our readers for the coming year. For us, reviewing the year gone by is important, as the past gives us the wherewithal to understand the present and step into the future with all our energy and purpose.
At the very outset, it is necessary to reiterate our basic approach, particularly in an environment which is engulfed by a mainstream media which is increasingly hegemonised by corporate ownership. No less important is the growing influence of social media where India has emerged as the prime hub of fake news and disinformation. It will be a cliché to point out that this space as well is dominated by the capital-intensive activities of the BJP IT Cell, whose principal occupation is to generate mutual hate and enmity among the people.
In such a vitiated atmosphere, People’s Democracy reassures our readers that we will rededicate ourselves to the task of cutting through the clutter and bring out reports and analyses with the Indian people’s interests as its center piece. People have to win over profit; unity has to win over hate and division. But it is also equally important to clarify who constitutes the ‘collective’ people. Doubtless, it is the working people – the working class, the peasantry, the agricultural workers – and the millions of democratic and secular minded citizens including students and young people, women who are marginalised and suffer social inequality and persecution, the tribals, the Dalits, the minorities – who fight for their existence and survival.
2025 has witnessed a pernicious growth of inequality across the globe, and particularly in India. Just one per cent have come to own over 40 per cent of wealth and income. It is, however, heartening to see that economists, scholars and researchers have got together to lay bare this obnoxious tendency of vulgar wealth and deprivation. Together with inequality, the other bane that afflicts the people in India is the growing unemployment which is assuming astronomical proportions. Obviously, these two factors impact aggregate demand in the economy and hold back the economy from growing in a manner which could be beneficial to all; but the burden disproportionately impacts people’s lives adversely. Certainly, the recent notification of new labour codes and the legislation for doing away with MGNREGA and the right based entitlements of rural poor, pompously named G RAM G, will further aggravate the employment question. Therefore, while the mainstream media puts one dimensional emphasis on GDP and the brave projections about relative size of the Indian economy, it obfuscates the harsh reality that the overwhelming majority of Indian citizens have come to suffer. Naturally, the five basics of human need – food, clothing, shelter, education and health – are in a state of worst crisis.
What is happening to education deserves special mention because it is here that the current regime has embarked upon the severest assault. Implementation of National Education Policy with emphatic bias for commercialisation and corporatisation is leading to large scale shutdown of government schools. The entire architecture of educational governance which was premised in decentralisation and legitimate rights of the state governments is being substituted by extreme centralisation. The winter session of Parliament saw the desperate attempt to pass the legislation for creation of Higher Education Council which will act like a super apex body by rendering all earlier structures irrelevant. This trend of centralisation has a second objective of communalising the content and capture institutions by bringing in wholesale communalisation and energise attacks on history and science to ensure the destruction of reason.
The question of justice, which is an essential ingredient of our Constitution, has also come under serious strain in 2025. Despite repeated demands of conducting a caste census, and notwithstanding the agreement that the government had to announce under insistent pressure, nothing has moved on the ground. On the contrary, Dalits and tribals faced the worst attacks during the year. Jal, jangal, zameen is further threatened by the corporate greed for encroaching forest land, particularly the mining corporates baying for eviction of the tribal people. Now, the question is also becoming linked to climate justice and overall degradation of environment. The air pollution levels in urban centres and the raid on Aravallis display a new obnoxious offensive. The issue of justice and equality of all vulnerable social groups along with Dalits, tribals, minorities and women, are merging with the issue of climate justice. Particularly, the gender question has assumed a precarious situation with the full-fledged offensive of Hindutva and the pursuit of manuvadi dictums.
It is not difficult to understand the fallout of all these processes and their disastrous impact on political democracy and secularism. On the question of democracy, what has stood out in 2025 is the situation facing the constitutional right to vote. The attack is twofold. Even after the scrapping of the Electoral Bonds, the latest figures show that the BJP is being handed over almost 90 per cent of the corporate contributions through Electoral Trusts. The other more vital question is the degeneration of the Election Commission of India into a pocket borough of the BJP. There is a heartening fight back by the people on the question of SIR. But latest facts show that the ECI did not even follow its own procedural requirements to decide on this bizarre campaign. Figures also show that SIR has become the biggest exclusionary exercise, compounded by the additional attempt to link voting rights with citizenship to be determined by the ECI. No law, no rule, but Amit Shah’s coinage of ‘detect, delete and deport’, is the SOP. In a true sense, we are heading towards a sham.
The world around us has seen major upheavals. 2025 has witnessed the site of the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, with all out support from United States. In fact, the attempt was to wipe out Arabs from Gaza. But heartening was the fight back by the people all over the world, ultimately forcing even the governments who in the past were sympathetic to Zionist Israel, to push for a ceasefire. But violations continue to take place. Unless Netanyahu and his gang is held accountable for their crimes against humanity, this will persist. Elsewhere, the US is trying to take up fresh adventures, as in Venezuela. But here again, due to growing signs of multi-polarity and assertions of China, US unilateralism is not being as decisive as in the past. Trump’s tariff terrorism has failed to secure the kind of dominance that it was aimed for.
The situation has become alarming in neighbouring Bangladesh. There are visible signs of fundamentalist aggression against not just minorities but all signs of sanity which emerged in the aftermath of the victory of Liberation Struggle in 1971. What comes to the fore is that in India as also in Bangladesh, it is not just exacerbation of fundamentalist and communal forces, but an attempt to completely overhaul national identity to transform secular democracies regressively into religious identity driven sectarian nationhood.
2026 therefore underlines mightier challenges. In Dickensian terms ‘it is the winter of despair’ but offers to march on to ‘the spring of hope’. People and their broadest unity and conscious, vigorous struggles can ensure this change over. Along with this broad-based unity, with clarity for an alternative and the pursuit of that course which will make the unity sustainable. People are the key link in the way all that which needs to be discarded along with 2025, to usher in new hope and happiness for 2026, can be ensured. The call for a nationwide strike by the united platform of trade unions and supported by the SKM on February 12, 2026, to express all out opposition to the labour codes and all other anti-people moves by the government is a concrete opportunity to forge that broadest possible unity which will have the potential to break new ground for such mighty struggles.
(December 24, 2025)
