Counterview

By A Representative   The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023–24) has raised serious concerns over infant and young child feeding practices in India, with the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) warning that the sharp decline in exclusive breastfeeding despite high institutional delivery rates should be treated as a national public health priority.

By Vivekananda Mathane   A close examination of electoral data from West Bengal presents a deeply troubling picture. This is no longer merely a matter of routine political fluctuations or changing voter preferences. The figures increasingly point towards a pattern of unusual voter expansion , systematic intervention in electoral rolls , and a recurring alignment between abnormal voter growth and political advantage.

By Rezgar Akrawi  Most countries of the Middle East and the Global South operating under authoritarian regimes share a single structural crisis, one whose substance is the acute and chronic fragmentation and weakness that afflicts mass organisations, trade unions, feminist movements and student bodies, extending further to undermine coordination among the forces of the left themselves. This is not a purely Iraqi predicament; it is a recurring phenomenon in comparable contexts, one that finds in the Iraqi experience its most transparent expression.

By Airlangga Pribadi Kusman, Imam Moeljadi  More than sixty years ago, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, warned that political independence meant little without economic sovereignty. In his famous Trisakti doctrine , announced during the 1964 Independence Day speech, Sukarno argued that a truly independent nation must achieve three things: political sovereignty, economic self-reliance, and cultural dignity. He believed that former colonial powers would continue to dominate newly independent countries through economic dependency and political pressure, even after formal colonialism had ended.

By Lucia Converti   Javier Milei’s government took office in December 2023 with a strong rhetoric about the need to expand freedom. However, rather than expanding it, his economic policy reduces it. Neoliberal policy advocates a model of free enterprise, free trade, and free movement of capital that favors the extraction of national surplus toward core countries, limiting the possibilities for local development and reinforcing the conditions of societal impoverishment.

By Vijay Prashad  The treatment of the flotilla activists by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was shocking only to those who continue to clothe colonial violence in the soft language of security. There is now a mountain of evidence before humanity: Gaza has become not merely a place under siege but a geography of calculated despair, where starvation and bombardment have been converted into instruments of political management. The activists aboard the flotilla were not armed combatants, nor were they soldiers threatening invasion. They were international volunteers, human rights advocates, doctors, parliamentarians, and organisers attempting to break the siege imposed on Gaza. Their journey was political, moral, and humanitarian. Yet the Israeli state met them with humiliation, detention, and theatrical violence.