Kavita Krishnan

The Indian media lost no time in naming last year's Mumbai terror attack "26/11" or "India's 9/11" - displaying unseemly pride in India's enhanced "status" as a US ally and a target of global terror.

In contrast to such a sentiment, thousands of workers, agricultural labourers, young people and students marched to parliament in the Indian capital of Delhi on 12 December 2008, a fortnight after the Mumbai attack, with slogans and placards that told the Indian government to "stop importing terror and economic crisis from the US!"

Kalinganagar and Paradeep in the state of Orissa and Nandigram in West Bengal are some of the emerging centres in the Indian countryside where the rural poor are waging pitched battles against corporate land grabs.

Rural India has been reeling under the onslaught of the policies of imperialist globalisation for over a decade. A recent study reveals that there have been nearly 150,000 farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2005, and there have been incidences of starvation deaths in many Indian states.