Monthly review | Continuing the good fight: From the emergency to today

Continue the good fight is the story of a young man's political coming of age and his experiences as a student activist and academic who was imprisoned by two authoritarian regimes in India half a century apart.

On September 25, 1975, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi called a strike to protest the expulsion of Ashoklata Jain, an elected member of the students' union. Three months earlier, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency. It was the second day of the strike, and the mood on campus was tense. A black car drove up near a group of students. Some plainclothes policemen got out and abducted one of them: the student spent the next year in prison. Almost fifty years later, on February 9, 2021, the house and offices of the founder of an online news portal were raided by law enforcement officials for 113 hours straight. Almost two years later, on October 3, 2023, the Delhi Police Special Branch showed up again. The founder of the news portal and his colleague were taken into custody under the dreaded Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

Student journalist and scholar Prabir Purkayastha tells his own story with wit and humor as he tackles some of India's most pressing social, political and economic issues over the decades – and remains true to his commitment to “continue the fight for the good cause.”

Praise for Continue the good fight

Prabir Purkayastha is an engineer in energy, telecommunications and software, a founding member of the Delhi Science Forum and editor of Newsclick.in. As a scholar and activist, he is the co-author, with Vijay Prashad, of Enron Blowout: Corporate Capitalism and Theft of the Global Commons (LeftWord 2002). At the end of 2023, the 74-year-old was detained in the Tihar prison complex in New Delhi under the Anti-Terrorism (Prevention) Act.