Word: communist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eastern metropolis of Kolkata. The somber portraits of dead white men - a bearded Marx, a bespectacled Lenin, and Stalin, his moustache bristling - peer down at passers-by from banners strung up over palm trees or street-corner billboards, accompanied by the less-hallowed visages of local comrades. India's Communists have been key players in the hurly burly of the world's largest democracy, dominating the ballot box in states like West Bengal, where Kolkata is the capital, and where a Communist government has ruled for over thirty years. But this month's national elections, won decisively by the ruling...
...Amid the hundreds of acronyms that make up India's political landscape, the Communists rank among the few recognized "national" political parties of India, along with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ruling Congress party. Competing for 130 seats, they only won 20, losing more than half their seats in the 543-seat lower house and suffering particularly costly setbacks in their strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala. In the last government, the Communists and their allies - known collectively as the Left Front - were an influential part of the ruling coalition. Now they have been relegated...
...Things are likely to get worse for India's Communists before they get better. Their defeats stem in part from a record of poor governance in the states where they draw most of their support; in West Bengal, a move by the ruling Communists to take land from peasants for private industrial projects led to a voter backlash in May's elections. Party insiders expect the outcome of state assembly elections in 2011 will end their already thin grip on power, and a growing schism between CPI-M politicians pushing for capitalist reforms and the more orthodox intellectual elite...
...their conflict over gas in January, Ukraine and Russia are again in the midst of a heated battle - this time, about the countries' shared Soviet past. As Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko this week lamented that Ukraine had become "a hostage in the fight between two totalitarian regimes - fascist and communist" and called for Soviet-era symbols around the country to be torn down, his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev ordered the creation of a presidential commission "to counter attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history...
...celebrity, some observers say could simply be the president's way of keeping local leaders from trying to up their status by basking in his reflected glory. Rakhmon, a former cotton farm boss whose prezident.tj website features nearly a dozen pictures of him on the homepage alone, led pro-communist forces against Islamist rebels during Tajikistan's civil war in the 1990s and became leader of the nation in 1992, a year after independence. The nation's longest-serving president, Rakhmon continues to command popular support, despite his rule being plagued by rampant corruption, vote rigging and unemployment that...