Government Of Kazakhstan Scholarships (Undergraduate, Master, PhD) 2023

Application Deadline:

30th June 2023.

Tell Me About Government Of Kazakhstan Scholarships:

Ministry of education and science of the Republic of Kazakhstan calls for foreign applicants, including persons of Kazakh nationality who are not citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan for full-time studying under Bachelor, Master and PhD educational programs.

What Type Of Scholarship Is This?

Undergraduate, Master, PhD

Which Countries Are Eligible?

International

Where Will Award Be Taken?

List of universities participants of Scholarship Program,  Bachelor / Master Degree / PhD Degree

How Many Scholarships Will Be Given?

1. Bachelor degree program – 490
2. Master degree program – 50
3. PhD degree program – 10

How To Apply For Government Of Kazakhstan Scholarships?

DOCUMENTS ARE ACCEPTED FREE OF CHARGE.

Application Instructions and Requirements

Guide for international students in Kazakhstan

Brochure

Application form can be submitted in Kazakh or Russian or English.

The applicants, when filling out the application form should attach the scanned copies of the following documents:

Bachelor degree:

1. Passport;
2. A document on the previous level of education with a transcript and supplement (if available) and a notarized translation into Kazakh or Russian or English (for applicants for a bachelor’s degree – the average score of the document confirming secondary education with a grade of at least “good” );
3. Motivational essay in Kazakh or Russian or English;
4. A letter of recommendation in Kazakh or Russian or English from the educational organization in which the applicant studied, or from the employer;
5. A medical certificate for study abroad, as well as a medical certificate confirming the absence of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV infection) and AIDS, issued by official health authority of the applicant’s country of residence;
6. Application form;
7. Letter of invitation from the Kazakhstan university (if available).

Master degree:

1. Passport;
2. A document on the previous level of education with a transcript and an appendix (if available) and a notarized translation into Kazakh or Russian or English (bachelor’s or specialist diploma with an average score of at least 3.0 (out of 4.0) GPA or its equivalent obtained in educational institutions;
3. Motivational essay in Kazakh or Russian or English;
4. 2 letters of recommendation in Kazakh or Russian or English from the educational organization in which the applicant studied, or from the employer;
5. A medical certificate for study abroad, as well as a medical certificate confirming the absence of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV infection) and AIDS, issued by official health authority of the applicant’s country of residence;
6. Application form;
7. Letter of invitation from the Kazakhstan university (if available).
8. An international certificate confirming knowledge of a foreign language:

• English: IELTS Academic (International English Language Testing System Academic) threshold score – at least 5.5;
• TOEFL IBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based test), threshold score – at least 46;
• TOEFL PBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language Paper-based test), threshold score – at least 453;
• German: Deutsche Sprachpruefung fuer den Hochschulzugang (DSH, Niveau B2/level B2), TestDaF-Prufung (Niveau B2/level B2);
• French: TFI (Test de Français International™) – not lower than B2 level in reading and listening sections), DELF (Diplome d’Etudes en Langue française) – level B2, DALF (Diplome Approfondi de Langue française) – level B2, TCF (Test de connaissance du français) – at least 50 points.
• An international certificate confirming the knowledge of a foreign language by a person for whom the indicated languages ​​are native is not required;

Government Of Kazakhstan Scholarships. Apply Now!

PhD degree:

1. Passport;
2. A document on the previous level of education with a transcript and an appendix (if available) and a notarized translation into Kazakh or Russian or English (bachelor’s or specialist diploma with an average score of at least 3.0 (out of 4.0) GPA or its equivalent obtained in educational institutions;
3. Motivational essay in Kazakh or Russian or English;
4. 2 letters of recommendation in Kazakh or Russian or English from the educational organization in which the applicant studied, or from the employer;
5. A medical certificate for study abroad, as well as a medical certificate confirming the absence of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV infection) and AIDS, issued by official health authority of the applicant’s country of residence;
6. Application form;
7. Letter of invitation from the Kazakhstan university (if any);
8. Substantiation of the topic of the dissertation research in the language of instruction (Kazakh or Russian or English);
9. An international certificate confirming knowledge of a foreign language:

• English: IELTS Academic (International English Language Testing System Academic) threshold score – at least 5.5;
• TOEFL IBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based test), threshold score – at least 46;
• TOEFL PBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language Paper-based test), threshold score – at least 453;
• German: Deutsche Sprachpruefung fuer den Hochschulzugang (DSH, Niveau B2/level B2), TestDaF-Prufung (Niveau B2/level B2);
• French: TFI (Test de Français International™) – not lower than B2 level in reading and listening sections), DELF (Diplome d’Etudes en Langue française) – level B2, DALF (Diplome Approfondi de Langue française) – level B2, TCF (Test de connaissance du français) – at least 50 points;

Visit Award Webpage For Details

How Stable is Israel?

Lawrence Davidson

Photograph Source: Effib at Hebrew Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.5

It is time to ask the question: just how stable is Zionist Israel? Is it possible that the Jewish population of Israel constitutes an inherently unstable society by virtue of deeply rooted divisions? Are these divisions so deeply rooted that they are irreconcilable? As Lloyd Green put it in a recent article in the Daily Beast, “Decades-old grudges have now morphed into pitched political battles. Antipathies of the old world are now playing out in what was thought to be a high-tech Hebrew-speaking Mecca.”

In the West, the potential for this upheaval has long gone unnoticed because of Zionism’s constant emphasis on the alleged threat of extermination at the hands of the Palestinians. Coincidentally, it has been the Zionist determination to dispossess all Palestinians that has allowed them to put off confronting their own internal problems.

Now, all of a sudden, it may well be time to pay the piper. Despite the current rightwing coalition’s attempt to delay intra-Zionist confrontation by pulverizing the Gaza population, the moment of political Zionism’s disintegration may well be at hand.

The accelerated expression of these internal problems, the one that has seen tens of thousands of mostly secular, upper class Ashkenazi Jews protesting in the streets of Israel, was triggered by a rightwing government’s efforts to destroy the independent status of the nation’s courts—particularly the Supreme Court. The reason this move was seen to warrant massive protests is because when it comes to the culture of Jewish Israel, as goes the judiciary, so goes the nation. To date the courts have been seen as a bulwark for secular society. Destroy that bulwark, and Israeli Jewish civil liberties become vulnerable to reactionary religious pressures. Here are some of the issues that court decisions have influenced in a liberal way: (1) Who is a Jew? The courts have recognized Conservative and Reform Judaism (the latter sect being the largest Jewish group in the United States) as legitimately Jewish, and any conversions made under their auspices as legal. The ultra Orthodox (Haredim) see this as a direct challenge to their influence over Israeli “Jewishness.” They insist that their form of Judaism is the only legitimate form. (2) What commercial activities should be allowed on the Jewish sabbath (Saturday)?  Should the stores open? Should the buses run? When and if they do operate, should they (and all other public facilities) be gender segregated? (3) Should ultra-orthodox men be exempted from otherwise compulsory military service? The courts have sometimes ruled against a blanket exemption for the ultra orthodox communities. And, to what extent should public monies go to support an ultra orthodox subgroup of males who do not serve and do not work (they just study the Torah) within the national economy? In terms of these last exemptions from military service and a subsidized excuse to avoid economic employment, much of secular Israel sees the ultra-orthodox as parasites.

This is, of course, only one half of the story. The Haredim see themselves as the only “real” Jews, and therefore the fight to preserve and extend their rights is seen as a fight to preserve Jewish Israel itself. Under these circumstances, Israeli judges who tend to support secularism are  “wicked judges,” and their decisions are “antisemitic.” They and those who support the predominance of secular life in Israel are seen as heretics.

Soon after the formation of the so-called left-leaning Bennett-Lapid government (2021-2022), negotiations began seeking a political alliance between Israel’s rightwing parties, both religious and secular. It should be noted that there is a secular right and it is made up mostly of the more traditional and observant Sephardic Jews whose origins are not European. The Sephardim constitute much of the voting power of Netanyahu’s Likud party. The aim of this rightwing alliance is a coalition government that would emphasize “the exclusive nature of Judaism in the State of Israel.” That “nature” is to be compatible with orthodox religious tenets.

These negotiations were successful and led to the present coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. This government’s rapid move to implement into law their version of a religiously inspired Zionism, initially through a “reform” of Israel’s judiciary, has triggered a confrontation with a frightened and angry secular community that seems capable of, and willing to, shut down the country’s economy before it will go along with religious right’s plans. These secular  protests have, in turn, angered at least some of the voters who helped put the present rightwing government in office—“people who are fed up being outsiders even after they’d won in the democratic game.” The frustration caused by a “recognition that you may be the ruling party but you’re not ruling” has led to recent counter demonstrations organized by the rightwing parties. Thus we have a confrontational environment wherein intra-Israeli Jewish differences come to the surface.

All of this was enough to throw the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, into a panic. After his mid-March compromise proposal for changes in the judiciary was rejected by Netanyahu and his rightist government, Herzog warned “Israel is in the throes of a profound crisis. Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The abyss is within touching distance.”

You get a sense of this “abyss” when you translate “civil war” into Hebrew. It comes out as “brothers’ war.” The fraternity has always been fragile and as a piece in the Middle East Eye puts it, “for many Israelis that fraternal feeling has now gone and has been openly replaced by hate, contempt, and plain horror.”

Such a destabilizing situation cannot help but erode the Israeli economy. And, it has done so by lowering the value of the shekel on currency markets, lowering the country’s credit rating, causing a drop in property values and unsettling the Israeli stock market. There are signs of both a flight of bank deposits and businesses abroad.

Worse yet, for a country that imagines itself under constant threat, elements of the military reserve have been critically alienated by the government’s actions and threaten to refuse to serve under the evolving new regime. These threats sent prime minister Netanyahu into as big a panic as Herzog’s. In an address to the nation on 28 March 2023, he declared, “The State of Israel cannot exist without the IDF and the IDF cannot exist with refusal to serve. … Refusal to serve is the end of our country. Therefore, I demand that the heads of the security services and of the army vigorously oppose the phenomenon of refusal to serve, not contain it, not understand it, not accept it – but put a stop to it.”

By the end of his speech Netanyahu had shown that he had replaced the prospect of compromise with a rather empty concept of dialog. “I – as Prime Minister – will take a time-out for dialogue.” But then came the declaration that “We insist on the need to enact the necessary changes in the judicial system … . Our path is just. Today, the great majority of the public recognizes the urgency of democratic reform of the judicial system. We will not allow anyone to rob the people of its free choice. While we will not give up on the path for which we were elected.” So what is there to dialog about?

There is an old adage which goes, ‘if you have internal problems that defy solutions, then start a war and force unity onto the country.’ This is exactly what Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition have attempted to do. It was a simple and obvious path to take given that the Palestinians are an always available whipping boy for the Israelis. What is surprising is that the press seems not to have recognized the gambit.

Google the proposition of diversion through war and you find the most recognition of this maneuver on leftist “outsider” sites: (1) a World Socialist Website article on the Israeli government’s provocation of the Palestinians. “As Netanyahu doubtless calculated when he started the military operation in Gaza, the opposition leaders dutifully fell in line. … They proved their unity … with Netanyahu and the far-right, above all in relation to the oppression of the Palestinians.” (2) The joint Israeli-Palestinian web site +972. “It was only a matter of time before Jewish Israelis — socially disintegrated, politically divided, economically sinking, and diplomatically entangled — would once again gather around the common denominator under which they can all embrace: the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.” (3) Also, the liberal Israeli news site Haaretz, which has recently expressed concern over the impending vote on a budget that would transfer large amounts of government resources to the ultra orthodox religious communities. The paper has called for renewed demonstrations. “We must not capitulate to the Netanyahu government’s distractions or spin. The protest must go one and even intensify.”

The problem with this tactic of shifting attention to an outside threat is that it will not work in the present circumstances. For one thing, the Palestinian “threat” is seen as perennial. More importantly, regardless of that threat, the unity of Netanyahu’s coalition demands a relentless process of realizing the demands of the religious parties in the form of new laws. Under such circumstances, the religious-secular contradictions must soon approach the breaking point. Think of it this way: (1) the envisioned new laws at once threaten Israel’s secular culture while at the same time (2) hold the ruling rightwing coalition together. Renewing the process of passing these laws is imminent, and so is some variation on Israel’s “brothers’ war.”

Back in 2016, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo expressed the opinion that “the internal threat must worry us more than the external threat.” He followed this up with a prediction, “If a divided society goes beyond a certain point, you can end up, in extreme circumstances, with phenomena like civil war. To my regret, the distance [until we reach that point] is shrinking. I fear that we are going in that direction,” Perhaps the Zionists have now arrived at that certain point.

Who are the Muslims and Christians in India: Understanding the ‘Hindu’ fear of Muslims and Christians

T Vijayendra

We have been seeing attacks on Christians and Muslims in India for the last few years. Several Indians are worried about it and fear for the future of democracy in India. People wonder what the logic of all these attack is. How can nearly 80% of ‘Hindus’ feel threatened by some 13% Muslims and some 2% Christians? Why are they being attacked?

Hinduism

No religion is a monolith. It is normally divided in sects, some more powerful than others, some rebels etc. Normally we refer to a religion by its dominant form. That is why we put inverted commas around the word Hindu. Rahul Sankrityayan defined this dominant Hinduism as having three characteristics:

1. Belief in rebirth and karma theory. 2. Belief in caste system. 3. Taboo on eating cows and bullocks.

The relationship between 1 and 2 is obvious. You are born in a caste due to your deeds (karma) in previous birth. It thus fulfils one of the functions of religion, that is, to justify the inequality in society and explain why the rich can get away with misdeeds while the poor have to be ethical to gain better life in the next rebirth. The taboo on eating meat of cows came into being due to the spread of agriculture and the living bullock and cows became more useful that their meat. So agricultural communities and upper castes stopped eating beef whereas lower castes and tribals continued eating the old and the dead animals. This Hindu society came into being after Buddhism, around 300 years B. C. Both the belief in rebirth and taboo on beef owe their origin to Buddhism and Jainism.

Conversions

Almost all the Muslims and Christians in India are converts from ‘Hindu’ society as defined above. Although Christians appeared in India almost immediately after the death of Christ and there have been Christians in India dating from 3rd century A. D., majority of conversions to Christianity occurred after colonialism, starting with the arrival of Vasco de Gama in 1498.

In that sense large scale conversion to Islam is older, starting immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th century A. D. It is interesting to note that the conversions occurred almost all over India with concentration in some regions.

Who got converted to Islam?

Majority of converts to Islam came from the artisan castes: weavers, carpenters, cobblers, petty traders and so on. We can see that majority of Muslims even today are engaged in these jobs and some newer jobs that have been created in the industrial era such as cycle and motor mechanics. Some communities of Muslims, like the Bohras have specialised in hardware trade.

Why have mainly these caste converted to Islam? Around the 8th century onwards a reform wave swept India in the form of Bhakti movement. A part of these were called ‘Nirgunias’ – those who believed in the formless God akin to Islam and Christianity. Most of the Nirgunia saints like Kabir, Dadu etc. belonged to these artisan castes. These castes had a relative freedom of movements and some of them got converted to Islam mainly through Sufism, whose philosophy/religion was closer to Nirgunia saints. Even today we can see the wandering Sufis relating with and sharing space with Nirgunias wandering sadhus. So majority of the Muslims are part of the working classes of India.

Who are the Christians in India?

Majority of the Christians are from tribal communities and dalits, with a concentration in the North East regions. Why did these communities convert to Christianity and not to Islam? Dalits probably could not because they had little mobility – they were and even today in many places are bonded in the village agrarian society. Tribals however were relatively free. It is argued that it is the taboo on pork in Islam that prevented these communities from converting to Islam. As in Muslim conversions, the Christians too are a part of the working classes in India. However a creamy layer has emerged in both these communities who are no longer part of this. Majority of the Muslim Jihadis come from this creamy layer.

Dependence of Indian society on these communities

These communities continue to survive because they provide some indispensable goods and services to the Indian society. Muslims poor provide mechanics and are small traders of fruits and vegetables in urban India. In rural India a lot of artisans – weavers, carpenters, leather workers come from this community. Often dead animals, particularly cows and buffaloes are handled by them.

Christian institutions provide services in the field of education and health. Historically some of our best modern schools, colleges and hospitals were established by Christian organisations. A large number of nurses and teachers come from them. And many Christians are skilled manual workers.

So why are Hindus scared of them?

Obviously not all Hindus, but mainly those upper caste Hindus who depend on the services of the working classes and get their wealth by exploiting them are afraid of them. But then which ruling class in the world has not been afraid of the working classes?

But here there is another challenge. Normally the ruling class rules by cultural hegemony, since they do not have the numbers. Only when seriously threatened they use violence. Now religion has always been part of this cultural hegemony. Conversions challenge this hegemony and an alternative religion which does not have the inequities of caste adds a weapon to these working classes.

Ambedkar’s role in empowering the dalits proved decisive. He fought at every level with an admirable determination and grit. His conversion to Buddhism and the reasons he gave for it are all valid for conversion to Islam and Christianity too. So these communities have emerged as a major threat to the ruling Hindu dispensation.

The situation today

Today this conflict has emerged as a civil war in India. It does not appear that this can be resolved by the liberal dispensations. Majority of liberals are upper caste Hindus who want to remain Hindus but want Hinduism without a caste system. A liberal says that s/he does not believe in caste. To which the dalit response is, ‘But I do not have that choice!’  Hindu reformists tried to create a version of Hinduism without the caste system over a thousand years and have not succeeded. Many religions like, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Lingayat religion emerged with this idea. But they all ended up as ‘caste’ themselves and had further caste divisions within them. This is true of Christianity and Islam too in India. Why so?

Caste in India is not just religion. It is integral to the organisation of rural agrarian community. When these newer religions came up the material condition of rural India did not change. So these new religious communities got absorbed in rural India’s caste system and division of labour.

It can be argues that today this society is breaking down but why does caste still persist? Dalit scholar Anand Teltumble argued that today practically all dalits are landless labour and they should organise as class. What is preventing them?

I can think of two historical reasons. The first is the animosity between Communists and dalit politicians. While there are mistakes on both sides I think it is the stand that the Communist led Girni Kamgar Union took on Dalit promotion in textile mills in Bombay that played an important role. The upper caste opposed because the worker has to put his lips to the broken thread and dalits were untouchables! Unfortunately GKU did not take a correct stand on this.

The other reason is the reservation policy in post independence India. Although it affects only a small percentage of dalits and tribals, it has created a caste identity politics and newer groups are demanding reservation. So now there is a new vested interest in retaining caste!

New Factors

How can these situation change? What are the new factors? One can think of two sets of situation –The Indian politics and the world situation.

In India today the ruling party is virulently Hindu and it is uniting the liberal with other oppressed groups. Student groups of dalits and left wing groups are sharing platforms. A new reorganization of radical forces is in the offing. This is joined by environmental and green groups too. Te latter has a portion of the scientific community also with them.

This is reinforced by the international situation too. Melt down of 2008 is leading to the collapse of the current capitalism and forces of restructuring capital in the shape of fourth industrial revolution, World Economic Forum and so on are active. This in my opinion has created a revolutionary juncture. Revolution is on the agenda. Would it succeed this time in India?

As Arundhiti Roy said India awaits a revolution that should include ‘annihilation of castes’!

To combat “fake news,” India’s far-right government creates new body of state censors

Kranti Kumara

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, led by the Hindu-chauvinist strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is mounting a sweeping attack on citizens’ constitutionally protected right to criticize its actions on social media.

It has authorized the creation of an official “fact-checking unit” that will have the power to order social media platforms to expunge whatever this far-right government deems as “fake or false or misleading” postings. This was officially announced by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on April 6 in an order amending the already anti-democratic Information Technology rules the Modi government had set out in 2021.  

All of this has been carried out in an autocratic style by means of a government “gazette notification,” with hardly any consultation with corporate media organizations and long recognized associations of journalists, let alone widespread democratic debate. The government Gazette is the official organ of the national government, published weekly to announce and disseminate decrees, legislation and documents, whereupon the provisions become legally binding.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a gathering in 2020. [AP Photo/Aftab Alam Siddiqui]

According to the new rules, this so-called fact-checking unit, or “bureaucracy of Truth” as some critics have aptly named it, comprised of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, will constantly monitor social media platform postings to identify “fake or false or misleading” information “[with] respect of any business of the Central Government.”

This wording makes clear that the government is particularly concerned with suppressing criticisms and exposures of its own actions and policies, including its relentless promotion of communalism, corrupt relations with big business and increasing resort to authoritarian methods of rule and outright criminality. However, the ambit of what the new “fact-checker” censors may order removed goes far beyond even this. It includes posts that threaten “the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence, or prevents investigation of any offence, or is insulting any other nation.”

Thus social media-hosted conversations or links to articles that criticize states and governments with which the Modi government has friendly ties, such as US imperialism, the Saudi absolutist sheiks or Israel, could be deemed by the “fact-checker” censors/bureaucrats as “harmful.” So too could postings that call for mass antigovernment protests or defiance of antistrike “essential service” orders.

In such cases, the “fake news” censors will notify online social media companies or their intermediaries including Twitter, Facebook and even WhatsApp and order them to immediately take down such postings. If they fail to do so, these companies risk losing their “safe harbor” protections.

Under the “safe-harbor” protections in the IT Act of 2000, intermediaries such as Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms are protected from any legal liability for content posted on their platforms by their users.

By threatening to remove this safe-habour protection, the government seeks not only to compel the social media conglomerates into enforcing its “fake news” suppression-orders. It is also seeking to intimidate them into preemptively identifying and removing “controversial” content, so as to remain in the government’s good books.

There has been no concerted effort by press organizations to challenge the BJP government’s new state censorship body and regulations. The Editors Guild of India, which claims to be an organization formed to protect press freedom, issued a pathetic statement that termed the IT Ministry’s sweeping attack on free speech “regrettable.” It then urged “the Ministry to withdraw this notification and conduct consultations with media organisations and press bodies.” In other words, the Guild wants to be consulted as a partner to come up with more palatable mechanisms for social media censorship.

Similarly the opposition parties, including the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, have not lifted a finger to mobilize opposition to this brazen and transparent attack on fundamental rights. The Stalinists—whose efforts are focused on assisting the Congress Party, until recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, in forming a right-wing anti-BJP electoral alliance for the 2024 national elections—issued a terse, pro forma statement criticizing the government’s “fake news” initiative.

The only court challenge to these latest IT rules has been filed by standup comedian Kunal Kamra in Bombay High Court. The court while hearing Kamra’s petition observed that “prima facie, the rules don’t seem to offer protection to fair criticism of the government like parody and satire.”

Recently the Modi government ordered raids on BBC offices after the British state broadcaster aired a documentary entitled “India: The Modi Question” that indicted Modi as directly complicit in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat, where he was the state’s Chief Minister. Government and BJP leaders denounced the documentary, and the Modi government blocked access to it.

These latest moves are an extension of the Modi government’s largely successful campaign to intimidate and cow the corporate media. The electoral wave that brought Modi to power in 2014 was very much media-driven, as the ruling class rallied round the BJP in the calculation that it was their best instrument for more aggressively pursuing pro-investor “reforms” at home and their great power ambitions on the world stage. However, to ensure continued strong media support, the BJP once in office used strong arm tactics and gangster-style threats to intimidate the press.

This was elaborated on by Bobby Ghosh, the former editor of the Hindustan Times, in a column he wrote for the Japan Times following the Indian government raids on BBC’s offices in Mumbai and Delhi on trumped-up tax fraud charges. “Just two years in power,” wrote Ghosh, “the Modi government was already demonstrating an intolerance of criticism that was familiar to me from my previous experiences as a foreign correspondent in the dictatorships of the Middle East. Stories deemed embarrassing to the government or the ruling party led routinely to minatory phone calls from ministers and bureaucrats: The threats ranged from the withholding of ads and the pursuit of punitive lawsuits to investigations into my personal finances and those of my family.” [Emphasis added]

Nowhere has the Modi government acted as brutally against the press as in Indian-occupied Kashmir. On October 19, 2020, slightly over a year after the Modi government’s August 2019 constitutional coup abrogating the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, police raided and permanently padlocked the Srinagar offices of Kashmir Times. As Anuradha Basin, the executive editor of the publication, recounted in a column in the New York Times, “the raid was punishment for daring to question the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.”

It has positively become dangerous to be a journalist in India, as the Modi regime and the BJP governments in various Indian states act viciously towards anyone it views as critical of their policies. They have charged numerous journalists with sedition. Some, arrested under the notorious UAPA “antiterrorism” legislation, have been held in prison for years without trial. According to the nonprofit organisation, Reporters Without Borders, India ranks an abysmal 161 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. In 2022, the country ranked at 150.

The Modi government is brazenly pushing ahead with these latest rule changes governing social media to further extend its repressive reach and prevent the dissemination of critical comments and exposures made by ordinary working people, political opponents and independent media voices, especially left-wing and socialist ones. It is doing so despite the fact that the previous amendments to the IT rules in 2021, which called upon the social media companies to “voluntarily” remove postings the government identified as “fake or misleading news,” are still the subject of a court challenge. In August 2021, the Bombay High Court issued a stay against a couple of the new rules but refused to throw out the amendments in their entirety even though they grossly infringe upon citizens’ basic free speech rights.

This again goes to show that the courts are themselves enabling the far-right, Hindu-supremacist Modi government to systematically chip away at democratic rights and impose its authoritarian rule. Time and again, India’s Supreme Court, which constantly postures as a sentinel of citizens’ democratic rights, has greenlighted the illegal acts of the Modi government and the Hindu right, such as the imposition of essentially dictatorial rule on Jammu and Kashmir through presidential decree since 2019 and the building of a temple to Lord Ram on the site of the razed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

Australian parliamentary inquiry into Long COVID downplays crisis

Frank Gaglioti

Published on April 24, an Australian parliamentary report, “Sick and tired: Casting a long shadow,” gave Long COVID sufferers a voice but minimised the impact of the ongoing pandemic and the resulting Long COVID crisis.

The inquiry, commissioned last September, received 566 submissions, many from Long COVID sufferers. Scientists and doctors testified to the high level of concern.

A drive-through COVID-19 testing clinic at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, January 8, 2022. [AP Photo/Mark Baker]

Hundreds of sufferers outlined the debilitating nature of their condition, especially brain fog. Many related the difficulty in getting a diagnosis or getting access to suitable treatment. Their submissions form an appendix to the report.

Mary Klestadt, for example, related: “I had gone from a person who had a full and busy life, ran (a) communications (business) and a web site … to someone who could barely hold a conversation and couldn’t manage paying bills.”

One submission outlined the situation of a family member who contracted COVID working in an aged care facility.

“Their Long COVID symptoms include ongoing fatigue, headaches, coughing, breathing problems, trouble sleeping, difficulties focusing on tasks due to fatigue and an ongoing feeling of ill health. My family member has no access to any Long COVID specialised treatment clinics in their area in regional Victoria, with most being located in city/metropolitan areas.”

Another submission stated: “Being a patient suffering Long Covid in Australia is horrendous. Diagnosis is very slow, GPs (General Practitioners) are hard to book, there is no real knowledge and no real diagnosis, no medication to help symptoms because they are simply thought they will eventually resolve after months of suffering.”

The WSWS has correctly characterised Long-COVID as a mass disabling event that will have devastating consequences for generations as the pandemic rages on. As our series reported, Eric Jeffrey Topol and his team published a study in Nature Reviews Microbiology in January that estimated that 65 million people are now suffering from Long COVID worldwide. This is undoubtedly an underestimate of the true extent of the crisis.

There is no national registry of Long COVID cases in Australia. Estimates of the prevalence depends on the definition of Long COVID applied. According to the Burnet Institute, 500,000 adults have Long COVID in Australia.

This toll could more than double by the end of this year. Kirby Institute epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre’s submission to the inquiry reported: “The model estimated that with a vaccine-only policy and no other efforts to mitigate transmission, almost all Australians will be infected at least once in the time window from January 2021 to August 2023. The total people with Long COVID by December 2023 is 1,323,482, with 43,910 of these being children 0-4 years of age.”

This is an indictment of the Labor government’s role in presiding over the elimination of all mitigation measures, leaving the population subject to the pandemic.

The inquiry was chaired by Labor politician Dr. Mike Freelander. His introduction to the report declared: “There is much that we do not understand about the virus, such as the fact that it is likely changing from being an acute pandemic virus to now an endemic form.”

This depiction of the pandemic as transitioning to an “endemic form” is a pseudo-scientific justification for the elimination of all mitigation measures aimed at controlling the virus.

As explained: “The term ‘endemic’ implies a predictable and controllable level of disease in a given geographic region.”

In reality, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve, producing immune system-evading variants. The latest subvariant Omicron XBB.1.16, given the name “Arcturus,” which emerged in India, is spreading globally. It has been detected in 33 countries, including Australia, and is expected to become the dominant variant.

The parliamentary report stated: “Evidence received throughout the inquiry highlighted that currently, the only way to certainly prevent Long COVID is to avoid any COVID-19 infection. To this end, the Committee turned its attention to how Long COVID can be prevented through COVID-19 vaccines, antiviral treatments for COVID-19, and reducing transmission by improving indoor air quality and ventilation.”

This statement leaves out the fact that the federal Labor government and its state and territory counterparts have scrapped all remaining safety measures, including mask and vaccine mandates and isolation requirements, and closed COVID testing and contact tracing facilities. So there is no effective surveillance of the spread of the virus, ensuring that most of the population has been infected.

The report presented estimates from the Department of Health and Aged Care, based on serological surveys of blood donors, that two-thirds of the population had been infected by August 2022. Infections would have substantially increased since then.

Anecdotal evidence was presented at the inquiry of people being infected several times, thus heightening their chance of contracting Long COVID.

The Omicron variant surge in December 2021 was used by governments internationally as an opportunity to end safety measures in order to reopen the economy. Without any evidence, they proclaimed the variant to be less virulent. In Australia, the Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly put this in its crassest form when he said the Omicron variant could be his “number one Christmas present.”

The report claimed: “Evidence is emerging that most people with Long COVID will recover.” But Long COVID is still little understood and the possible long-term consequences cannot be known currently. It is well established for chicken pox that its long-term manifestation, shingles, may not appear for several decades.

In her submission, MacIntyre provided a chilling assessment of the proportion of Long COVID sufferers who would never recover from Long COVID: “Over 3 percent of the 0–4-year-old age group are estimated to never recover, while almost 1 percent of 5–19-year-old and over 6 percent for the population 20+ years old were estimated to never recover.”

The report declared: “The importance of mask wearing, physical distancing, hygiene and taking other health precautions when visiting high-risk settings cannot be underestimated. However, the enforcement of these health measures is largely at state and territory government discretion, and to varying extents, now a matter of individual responsibility.”

This promotion of “individual responsibility” is to absolve governments of any obligation for ensuring public health. One of the greatest achievements of science, originating in the Renaissance, was the development of public medicine to fight the scourge of pandemics. The science of public medicine and all its gains over centuries have been ditched in the drive for the profit interests of the ruling class.

Academic Nick Dregenberg pointed out in his submission: “The public is asked to individually manage their risk of infection, but the data they might use to do that, such as testing/case data linked to location, is being removed from public dashboards, and testing and reporting is optional. You can’t manage a risk you can’t see. And in workplaces staff are not told of other infected colleagues.”

According to the Burnet Institute submission, the “nature and prevalence of Long COVID in Australia is not unique compared to other countries.” Yet the report questioned “whether international Long COVID prevalence studies are applicable to the Australian context.”

In support, it cited the federal Department submission that “most people in Australia who have had COVID-19 have been infected with the Omicron variant, which has been the dominant variant in Australia since December 2021. Infection with Omicron has been associated with a lower risk for Long COVID than infection with the Delta variant.”

This is a reassertion of the unfounded claims that Omicron is less virulent.

The committee’s recommendations, based on these faulty premises, promote the use of vaccines and antivirals, along with improved ventilation in buildings. These measures will do nothing to alleviate the condition of people who already have Long COVID. Nor does it reinstate the other mitigation measures necessary to combat the pandemic, such as mask mandates, contact tracing and isolation where necessary.

The government has not formally responded to the report. Health and Aged Care Minister Mark Butler said on April 24 that it would contribute $50 million to research into Long COVID, on top of $19.6 million already being spent. This is minuscule compared to the huge emerging crisis and the complexity of the condition.

Surge of COVID across Canada as hospitals drop mask mandates

Dylan Lubao

As the new and highly infectious XBB.1.16, or “Arcturus” variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus sweeps across the world, Canada, like every capitalist country, stands woefully ill prepared to handle further waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A registered nurse pulls on a new N95 mask as indentations remain from another she had just removed after leaving a COVID-19 patient room in the acute care unit of Harborview Medical Center, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, in Seattle. Washington Gov. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

The resurgence of COVID is above all due to the “Forever Covid” mass infection policy of governments at the provincial and federal levels, mirroring their counterparts internationally. The Trudeau Liberal government has spearheaded this policy, including by embracing the demands of the far-right Freedom Convoy in early 2022 to dismantle all remaining public health measures. The Liberals received unflinching support from the trade unions, which have suppressed all efforts by workers during the pandemic to resist dangerous working conditions.

Several provinces have recently experienced an uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. During the week leading up to May 12, Manitoba saw 41 COVID-19-related hospitalizations, up 16 from the previous week. ICU admissions also increased to 11, and two died of the disease.

In the same week, Nova Scotia reported eight COVID-19 deaths, with health authorities quick to point out that these were previously unreported deaths and “most likely occurred” during previous weeks and months. 

This only underscores the extent to which any semblance of data gathering on the pandemic has been dismantled by every level of government, with the exception of wastewater monitoring. In essence, the country’s entire population of 38 million people is flying blind through an ongoing pandemic, with the only systematic data analysis and interpretation conducted by volunteer groups like COVID-19 Resources Canada, which compiles a monthly national Hazard Index and tracks both hospitalizations and deaths.

The XBB.1.16 variant is thought to have originated in India and has led to a massive surge of infections and hospitalizations in that country. On April 11 alone, the country registered 5.5 million new infections, which is almost certainly an undercount given the notorious COVID-19 minimizing of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who infamously vowed to save the country not from the virus itself, but from “lockdowns.”

XBB.1.16 is a combination of the BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 variants and features an additional mutation on its spike protein. Lab studies have shown that this mutation could potentially increase infectivity and severity of disease. Nevertheless, government and health authorities across Canada have blithely dismissed the danger of the new variant. In this, they took their cue from the misnamed World Health Organization, which recently ended its designation of the pandemic as a global health emergency as a concession to the financial markets.

The new variant was expected to make up at least one-third of all new infections in Ontario by mid-April. Positivity rates have begun to climb in the province after reaching a one-year low two weeks ago. The province witnessed 16 COVID deaths during the second week of May, although hospitalizations are below the previous low set in June 2022.

Several disturbing developments point to a further weakening of collective protection against the coronavirus, which will lead to an increase of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.

The vast majority of health care settings in Canada have dropped mask mandates for both patients and staff. This includes hospitals and community clinics. At the same time, public messaging from provincial capitals and their health authorities has put the onus on individuals to mask, effectively placing the responsibility for acquiring COVID-19 on the individual themselves, not on capitalist public health policies designed to infect the entire population.

The rhetoric guiding this campaign is degenerate and politically dishonest, emanating from provincial public health officers and health care executives whose conduct throughout the pandemic has directly led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people from COVID-19. In essence, they are political criminals trying to whitewash their complicity in policies of mass death.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer, who oversaw the reopening of schools during the first year of the pandemic and steadfastly refused to categorize SARS-CoV-2 as an airborne pathogen, claimed that the province was not “telling you not to wear a mask, what we’re saying is it’s no longer mandatory…”

Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infection control physician at the University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario, had the gall to claim that health care worker burnout, caused by mass infection policies that have pushed the health care system past the breaking point and drove legions of workers to quit the industry, was actually caused by mask-wearing.

“...if there’s anything we can do to try to alleviate the stress,” Vaisman began, “if you could remove masking where it’s no longer necessary and where the risk is extremely low … it’s very helpful to reduce burnout.”

The response by Canada’s trade union bureaucracy is indicative of its position throughout the pandemic, which has been to buttress the governments’ workplace and school reopening drives and mass infection policies, while sabotaging all worker opposition.

Mark Hancock, national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), responded to news of the lifting of mask mandates in hospitals by exclaiming that it was “not acceptable for governments to allow employers to ‘download workplace safety onto front-line workers.’”

But this is precisely what CUPE and every other union in the country has allowed these governments to do for over three years. Whenever workers, including teachers, nurses and factory workers rose up to overturn unsafe pandemic conditions and institute better protections, union bureaucrats quickly smothered these initiatives. In one collective bargaining struggle after another, the unions conspicuously omitted any mention of COVID-19, while working behind the scenes with management to ratify sellout contracts.

In addition to the removal of mask mandates in the country’s ailing health care institutions, free rapid-test disbursement has ended or is ending across the country. Quebec has just pulled free rapid-tests from store shelves, and Ontario is quickly following suit. These tests in and of themselves are a poor substitute for the more accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which for over a year have been denied to all but the most medically vulnerable.

Dr. Tara Moriarty, head of COVID-19 Resources Canada, recently pointed to the steep drop-off in vaccine uptake in the population. According to Moriarty, only 12.8 percent of the population has completed their primary COVID vaccine series or had a new dose within the last six months. This rises to 30 percent for people aged 70 or older, but vulnerability among the population at large puts the elderly at increased risk of acquiring the disease, especially in health care settings where there are now zero mitigations in place.

Canada’s public health care system, already buckling after decades of budget cuts prior to the pandemic, is being shaken to its very foundations. This fact was highlighted by an open letter penned by a group of physicians at British Columbia’s Surrey Memorial Hospital, desperately warning “the public of the unsafe conditions that exist in our hospital, and the lack of communication about this crisis to patients and public.”

The letter paints a macabre picture of hallway medicine in the province’s busiest emergency department, including patients waiting for days on a gurney to be seen by a doctor, with some dying in the process. While the example of Surrey Memorial is illustrative, workers all over Canada will be familiar with similar horror stories in their own regions.

Even though ICU admissions for severe COVID-induced pneumonia are lower than the brutal Omicron-fueled winter surge of 2021-2022, at least 52,000 of the most medically vulnerable Canadians to date have died of what is a completely preventable disease.

In other words, had a robust COVID-19 elimination strategy been instituted at the start of the pandemic, and coordinated on a global level, tens of thousands of people would still be alive. This is before taking into account the roughly 15 percent of the population suffering from the effects of Long COVID, which could prove to be a lifelong affliction for those affected.

Czech Republic: Unions announce strikes against government’s austerity package

Markus Salzmann

The Czech trade union confederation ČMKOS announced strikes last week. These come in response to a drastic austerity package proposed by the right-wing government, which includes cuts in public sector wages, pensions and curtailment of social benefits.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin (May 2022) [Photo by Regierungsamt der TR]

The five-party coalition constituting the government in Prague presented its austerity package under the title “Getting the Czech Republic in Shape” just a few days earlier. The cuts are intended to save 94 billion crowns (€4 billion) next year and 150 billion crowns in 2025. The 55 individual measures mainly curtail spending, and taxes will also be raised.

The biggest savings are to be realized by cutting 46 billion crowns in subsidies. This mainly affects support for small and medium-sized enterprises and social projects. This will further thin the already catastrophic social infrastructure in the country.

Twenty billion crowns are to be saved directly at the expense of public sector employees. This is to be achieved by reducing wages and cutting jobs. This will affect employees in clinics, schools, kindergartens and public transport, who performed superhuman feats and faced great dangers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to the “consolidation package,” the Czech government has also proposed a reform of the pension system. Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the right-wing liberal Civic Democratic Party (ODS) boasted that he would be the first head of government to implement a “reform” of pensions in 10 years. Previous governments had similar plans, but either dropped or greatly curtailed them due to massive protests.

Among other things, the reform envisages an increase in the retirement age from the current 65 to as much as 68, as well as a tightening of the rules for early retirement. The latter means significant losses for those who have to retire earlier due to physically demanding work. In addition, pensions will be decoupled from inflation once and for all and will no longer increase, or only increase slightly, for the foreseeable future.

In March, the government had already removed the statutory pension adjustment, with the result that pensioners received only €32 more per month instead of €75.

While corporate taxes are only increasing by 2 percent, which businesses can absorb thanks to the cuts made in recent years, the property tax and value-added tax hikes are fully at the expense of smaller and middle-income earners. The increase in property tax mainly hits owners of houses in rural areas, who often own nothing more than their homes. At the same time, it will lead to a further increase in rents, which are already astronomical in big cities like Prague.

In addition, the government wants to impose numerous other measures at the expense of the population. Among them, for example, an increase in highway tolls and additional costs for mandatory health insurance. The value-added tax on printed newspapers will be more than doubled, to 21 percent. Commentators assume that this will result in a widespread kill-off of newspapers, to which thousands of jobs will fall victim.

If inflation is taken into account, the trade unions calculate that a family with one child and two average incomes will have between €6,500 and €7,500 less available in the future. Average inflation in the Czech Republic is currently 15 percent, and for many goods such as food and energy it is even higher.

At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Labour Marian Jurečka (KDU-CSL) stated that there was no room for the minimum wage to rise this year. He even rejected the completely insufficient demand of the trade unions to increase the minimum wage to the equivalent of €779 per month.

Against this backdrop, the Czech-Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions felt compelled to declare a “strike alert” as the last stage before work stoppages. ČMKOS Chairman Josef Středula declared that the austerity package “has exceeded all the limits we can imagine.”

In fact, the unions are not concerned with defending the people’s standard of living. For 30 years, they have been working closely with governments and companies, helping to organize an unprecedented social clearcut. That is why the austerity package was initially discussed in a non-public meeting of the government, unions and employers.

When the unions now announce strikes, they do so in order to maintain control over the workers in this highly tense situation. The events in France, where workers have been taking to the streets for many weeks against the Macron government’s pension reform, deeply worry the unions.

In recent months, the Czech Republic has seen repeated protests in which thousands have taken part in demonstrations against the war in Ukraine and its devastating consequences. Although the protests are mainly dominated by right-wing, nationalist forces due to the absence of a progressive political force, unions and the government fear an expansion of the protests in the face of massive opposition to the war.

With the austerity package, the costs of military buildup are being passed on directly to the population. The unions themselves support the government's course. Středula and other union representatives openly call for tougher EU action against Russia and support the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev.

The Czech Republic’s government of several center-right parties explicitly supports NATO’s proxy war against Russia. The Czech Republic was one of the first countries to provide heavy weapons to Ukraine. So far, 89 tanks, 226 armored vehicles, 38 howitzers, and rocket launchers and ammunition have been handed over to Ukraine, according to Fiala. The total value of state aid to Ukraine so far is worth about 10 billion crowns (€420 million), the prime minister said. Additionally, companies have been granted licenses to export 68 billion crowns worth of weapons to Ukraine.

Despite the Czech Republic’s high national debt, which has reached its highest level since 1993, and the threat of an EU deficit procedure, the government agreed to further increase military aid to Ukraine while drastically increasing the armament of its own military. Just recently, parliament decided to increase defence spending to 2 percent of GDP. Currently, it stands at 1.52 percent.

In addition to that, there is a negative outlook for economic development in the country. The European Development Bank EBRD has again lowered the Czech Republic’s growth prospects. According to this analysis, GDP will fall by 2.2 percent in 2023. In February, growth of 0.2 percent was still expected.

Ruthless militarization at all costs has been stepped up since Petr Pavel was elected president. The former NATO general is considered a zealous warmonger against Russia. Like the Fiala government, he advocates an intensification of the conflict with Russia in the Ukraine war. The arms deliveries to Ukraine so far do not go far enough for him. He sees “really no reason to set limits,” he declared. Recently, at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, he called for a further escalation of the war and said the goal must be to integrate Ukraine as far as possible into NATO and the EU.

The announced strikes in the Czech Republic are part of an international development. Millions of workers in Germany, Britain, the US and other countries are in labour struggles and coming into direct conflict with governments. As in the Czech Republic, in France and elsewhere, the ruling class is determined to impose the costs of the war on the population.

Likewise, the governments of Slovakia and Estonia are currently working out similar austerity packages. The new Estonian government under Kaja Kallas placed social cuts and rearmament at the center of its policy immediately after taking office. While the small Baltic state ran up debts of €1.2 billion last year alone due to additional spending on the military, the budget is to be balanced this year through tax increases and budget cuts. At the same time, defence spending is planned to increase to 3 percent of GDP.