Barry Pavier

India ended 2020 in political turmoil. On 26 November around 250 million people were on general strike against three pro-employer labour laws. Immediately after this the capital Delhi was surrounded by tens of thousands of farmers protesting against another three pro-corporate agricultural ‘reform’ laws.

The year began with the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of prime minister Narendra Modi being put under immense pressure from mass protests against a new anti-Muslim law, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

This book is part of a bitter debate inside the Indian left about the conflict between the state and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the Dandakaranya forest region of eastern India.

Mukherji , a prominent academic at Delhi University, is quite clear in his judgment: "The Maoist party has no history of struggle outside jungles, no history of participation in broad resistance movements, clear complicity with mafia and reactionary forces, little concern about abject conditions of the people in areas they control."

The final part of Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet is a reflection of the descent of Pakistan (or "Fatherland", as it is called throughout the novel) into its own special kind of hell.

The story is told through the voice of a 60-something narrator, required to redeem a very old debt of honour to a dying radical artist, a friend of his youth in Lahore. The task is to write the painter's biography and to do this the narrator has to excavate the story of his network of friends and acquaintances from the radical intellectual milieu of the Punjabi bourgeoisie.

This is the end of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's "solution by violence" to the civil war that has dragged on since 1983. He abandoned attempts at a negotiated solution and increased military spending hugely in preparation for the offensive.

The conflict has its roots in British colonial policy. The majority in the country was then the Buddhist Sinhalas; the minority Tamils, mainly Hindus and Muslims, were in the north. As usual the British recruited a minority into the lower levels of their administration, in this case the Tamils.

This is probably the best book going on the partition of the British Indian Empire.

It provides an incisive analysis of the endgame of the empire between 1945 and 1947. What comes across loud and clear is the extent to which all the major players failed to foresee the consequences of their actions. Probably the ones most guilty of reckless adventurism were the Muslim League leadership, headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The ceasefire had been negotiated with the help of the Norwegian government in 2002 and brought to an end a war that had been going on since 1983. However, it did not resolve the issues that had caused the conflict in the first place.