A NEW political force is born in the state of Telangana. This force is Bahujana Left Front. The creation of Bahujana Left Front (BLF) has now become the topic of discussion in the arena of politics. Bahujans mean all those people across the society who endure economic exploitation and social oppression. The formation of a political front with an ideological foundation of uniting all these people is a welcome and hopeful development. Times and generations have changed, but still bahujans are treated as vote banks and not as human beings.

THE activists attending a workshop on urban issues organised in Visakhapatnam, repeatedly stated that dogs and mosquitoes are a major menace in their city. In fact, some of them stated that this menace is THE problem faced by people residing in their respective localities. More or less at a similar time, the Kerala government had approached the Supreme Court stating that the compensation for dog bite victims, decided by the committee appointed by the Court (which in some cases is as high as Rs 20 lakhs) ‘as extremely high’ and needs to be revisited.

ISRAELI prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Bibi, as Modi fondly calls him, is scheduled to visit our country from January 14-18, 2018. This visit, coming in the background of deepening Indo-Israel ties, notwithstanding the occasional hiccups like the recent vote on Jerusalem, is intended to further cement the blossoming relationship.Our country never had historic relations with Israel, though both the countries were ‘born’ only a year apart.

AN unprecedented wave of workers’ and farmers’ struggles spread across the whole country through the year that is coming to an end. It challenged the Modi government and its pro-rich, anti-working people, anti-farmer policies, forcing the government to reverse course in some cases. These battles spanned issues related to falling living standards, growing inequality and loot by the ruling classes, as also the communal politics of the Sangh Parivar that is trying to divide people on religious identity lines.

THE town that is called Ayodhya in Valmiki’s Ramayana, as well as today, was known as Awadh in pre-British times. Tulsidas in his Ramcharit Manas called it Awadh-puri. It was a large city, capital of the province that was also called Awadh. It had, therefore, a large Muslim population. So it was that when Babur established the Mughal Empire in India in 1526, and Awadh or Ayodhya fell into his hands, his governor Mir Baqi built a large mosque there, which came to be known as the Babri Masjid.