3 Review(s)

It is a matter of great satisfaction that the Navatelangana Publishing House is bringing out the selected speeches of Sitaram Yechury as Member of Rajya Sahba, on the occasion of CPI(M) all India Conference at Hyderabad in April 2018. The idea of bringing out a book with selected speeches of Comrade Sitaram Yechury in Rajya Sabha, goes back to 2011 when he completed his first term. Though the initial skeleton for the intended book was prepared, it went into different hands that led to inordinate delay in taking current shape. The selection then was more precise and striking and had given us an opportunity to cover the most of the important speeches. As time passed on the number of his interventions in Rajya Sabha also had grown into hundreds. Out of a total of 1689 interventions we are able only to present 97 speeches in two volumes, which we felt are important and topical in nature beyond time. Choosing around 1/16th from the corpus itself is a big challenge. The volume of interventions itself suggests the role played by the Left in the Indian parliament in safeguarding the foundations of our Secular Democratic constitution and advancing people’s struggle to create a better India. Finally these selected speeches covering a Pushkaram period of his stint in Rajya Sabha are divided into five categories spanned out in two volumes so that we can use this opportunity to present theme based understanding and thus are now before the readers. Under the section titled ‘State of the Nation’, in the first volume, primacy was given to cover all core issues related to governance and nation building. The second section focused on issues of economic importance from the point of view of people’s comprehensive development. The speeches presented in both these sections are not merely confined to be a critique of the existing neoliberal order but also an attempt to provided alternative perspectives about nation building by providing a window to look at the nation on the move. - Vijayarao Gudipudi