EDITORIAL: HINDUTVA IN THE UNIVERSITY

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

On the 17th of January 2016, Rohith Vemula, a PhD student from the University of Hyderabad, committed suicide. The first ten pieces of this bulletin are devoted to examining Rohith’s suicide, but in this editorial, we wish to point out fact that this event shone an uncomfortable light on the shocking casteism that pervades Indian university hostels. Even in places like JNU, Dalit students are routinely subjected to social boycotts in hostels. Read more…

THEY CALL US ANTI-NATIONAL

Anand Patwardhan

 

Their founding fathers came from the most conservative Brahmin castes, with enormous faith in the culture that empowered them. Read more…

SUICIDE OF THE DALIT STUDENT ACTIVIST ROHITH VERMULA

Academics, Scholars and Concerned Citizens

 

The following is a compilation of responses by Academics, Scholars and Concerned Citizens to the suicide of the PhD student of University of Hyderabad in January 2016. Read more…

ROHITH VEMULA, DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER TO PURIFY HIGHER EDUCATION

Kancha Ilaiah

 

The Dalit student whose suicide has generated political waves was a brilliant man. His letter to Prof Appa Rao, the newly appointed vice-chancellor of the university who was once believed to be anti-Dalit by the government, shows that at the time of his suicide, he was angry, upset and depressed. Read more…

ANCIENT PREJUDICE, MODERN INEQUALITY

Ananya Vajpeyi

 

If Ekalavya’s dismembered digit has haunted the Hindu schoolyard from time immemorial, Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide lays bare the deep inequality undergirding the modern state and its institutions of higher learning. Read more…

A NEW DALIT IDENTITY

Apoorvanand

 

The RSS has taken upon itself to define who is a pure Dalit and who a nationalist. Read more…

MESSAGE ABOUT ROHITH VEMULA

Susie Tharu

 

Dear Friends

 

Some of you may recall that three years ago there were a spate of students suicides—once again mostly dalits. At that time the AP High Court had passed an order suggesting administrative measures and safeguards in universities. Barring a few desultory and soon abandoned moves to set up counselling centres neither the UGC nor the universities acted on the order. Read more…

END THE SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE AGAINST DALIT SCHOLARS IN INDIA

SANSAD News Release On Rohith Vemula

 

SANSAD mourns the suicide of Dalit PhD student, Rohit Vemula at the University of Hyderabad on January 17 and joins the students, academics, civil society organizations, and politicians across India in condemning the persistent and increasing violence against Dalits in India and the systemic discrimination in its institutes of higher education, of which Rohith’s tragic death is a consequence. Read more…

BEFORE I SPEAK OF THE STARS…

Ravi Sinha

 

Let me speak first of Rohith Chakravarthi Vemula. I never met him. I wish I had, although that would have made me hardly any worthier of speaking about him. Had I met him, I would have come to know that I shared with him a passion for science, nature and stars. I would like to think that he would have found in me, despite my being from another generation, a comrade-in-arms and a fellow campaigner for a better world. Perhaps I would have also recognized a few of the scars left over from a childhood spent in poverty. But, there, the similarities would have ended. Read more…

STATEMENT ON ROHITH VEMULA

Irfan Engineer

 

Dear friends, Hope by now you came to know about the unfortunate incident that took place in the University of Hyderabad.  Read more…

WHO KILLED AT BATHANI TOLA?

Anand Chakravarti

 

Two decades after the massacre, the families of victims wait for justice. Read more…

WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS?

Pushkar Raj

 

The Bombay high court judgment cancelling Prof. Sai Baba’s bail and initiating contempt proceedings against the writer Arundhati Roy is a major blow to the human rights defenders in the country. Read more…

THE IDEA OF INDIA

Ram Puniyani

 

As we welcome the New Year (2016) with hope and optimism, the events of the year gone by flash to our mind; those events which are going to have influences in the times to come. We saw that the politics of the BJP led NDA government was practically marked by the controlling agenda of Hindu nationalism dictated by RSS. With the statements of the Sadhvis, Sakhis and Yogis the atmosphere of hate towards minorities saw a peak of sorts. Be it the issue of beef eating, love jihad or rational thinking; these elements came down heavily on the values of Indian democracy, principles of Indian Constitution and atmosphere of amity nurtured by Indian ethos for centuries. Read more…

THE RSS IS CONSPIRING TO GAIN A HOLD OF ALL ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS

Sandeep Pandey/Mayak Jain

 

On December 21, Banaras Hindu University convened a board meeting and decided to show the door to Magsaysay award winner and visiting professor Sandeep Pandey, allegedly for his “anti-national activities”. Pandey had been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology-BHU for two-and-a half years. He sparked a storm in the academic community with his allegation that his political ideology had him a target of the Narendra Modi government. Read more…

BANGLADESH’S ISLAMIST CHALLENGE

The death sentence handed out to two students last week for the murder of a secular blogger in Bangladesh marks the first major verdict in a string of cases related to the killings of writers in the South Asian nation. Read more…

PAKISTAN: TEXTBOOKS AND MILITANCY

Fawad Ali Shah

 

They killed university students this time. Brutally. Who is responsible for this massacre? The elected government or the security establishment? Could the government have taken any steps to prevent this tragedy? Did it fulfill its promises made under the National Action Plan (NAP)? Read more…

COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN 2015: A GLIMPSE INTO UP, BIHAR AND HARYANA

Neha Dabhade

 

North India has reported highest number of instances of communal violence in the year 2015.  Some news reports went as far as calling the cow belt of India a tinderbox of communal violence. Some characteristics were discerned to have beset the violence all over northern India and particularly in Uttar Pradesh. Read more…

EDITORIAL: HINDUTVA TARGETING BOLLYWOOD

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

For better or for worse, the Indian film industry, sometimes referred to as Bollywood, remains an important marker of the Indian identity. Bollywood is truly a contested terrain where forces of neoliberalism clash with socialism, where communalism engages secularism, where rampant sexism meets the forces of feminism and caste ideology is reinforced and contested. Read more…

REVISITING P.C. JOSHI IN TODAY’S CONTEXT

Sobhanlal Datta Gupta

 

It is an irony of history that P.C. Joshi, the architect of united front politics in pre-independence India, is a much-maligned, almost forgotten, figure in today’s Left circles, although it is precisely his idea of forging unity with the secular, nationalist forces under the slogan “Left-democratic unity” that is the key issue which now engages the Left. Read more…

INSTITUTIONAL RIOT SYSTEM AND CULPABILITY IN COMMUNAL VIOLENCE

Irfan Engineer and Neha Dabhade

 

Whenever confronted by increasing intolerance and increase in incidences of communal violence in the country, the standard response of the BJP leaders and spokespersons is that incidences of communal violence took place even during UPA regime in particular and Congress regimes in general. They point out the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 in Delhi and other states; and various communal incidences that took place when Congress Party was in power. Besides the fact that incidences of communal violence have actually increased in the year 2015 to 650 from 644 in 2014, it would be simplistic equate the incidences of violence merely on the basis of statistics. Read more…

FIRST PERSON: A POLICE OFFICER’S ACCOUNT OF BEING HARASSED FOR STOPPING A RIOT IN RAJASTHAN

Ajaz Ashraf

 

Superintendent of Police Pankaj Choudhary stopped a riot, but got a call from the Inspector General in the Chief Minister’s Office to release Sangh activists arrested for triggering it. Read more…

WORMS FOUND IN BABA RAMDEV’S PATANJALI ATTA NOODLES

Ajay Kumar

 

Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Atta noodles, which were set to raise competition in the market, seem to be falling prey to controversies with worms being found in a packet in Narwana city of Jind district in  One Vinod Kumar bought the Patanjali atta noodles packet containing worms from an authorised shop selling Patanjali products which was situated in Model Town road area of Narwana on Thursday. “I had gone to purchase half kg of ghee from the shop. Read more…

BANGLADESH: EXECUTIONS POLARIZE BANGLA ALONG LIBERAL & RADICAL LINES

Jaideep Mazumdar

 

DHAKA: Last week’s executions of two war criminals, convicted of genocide during the 1971liberation war that led to Bangladesh’s creation, have polarised the country along liberal and radical lines. Liberals say Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) functionary Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury and Jamaat-e-Islami secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed’s hangings were necessary to defeat forces opposed to secular and progressive ideals the country was founded on. Read more…

INDIA, PAKISTAN TO RESUME DIALOGUE, BUT NO CRICKET YET

Amitabh Pashupati Revi

 

Sushma Swaraj, who went to Islamabad on Tuesday to attend a meeting on Afghanistan, today met Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Read more…

TETE A TETE WITH HISTORIAN IRFAN HABIB

Manjula Sen

 

The Yamuna Expressway scoops up the car from Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, and deposits you at the other end where a forked market-lined road eventually leads to Aligarh. There the 138-year-old Aligarh Muslim University’s sparkling campus sits picture perfect. Read more…

JOINT STATEMENT CALLING ON THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF PAKISTAN TO VOTE AGAINST THE PREVENTION OF ELECTRONIC CRIMES BILL IN ITS CURRENT FORM

Article 19, Digital Rights Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Privacy International, the Association for Progressive Communications and other organisations remain seriously concerned by the proposed Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill in Pakistan. Read more…

WILL A SRI LANKAN WOMAN BE STONED TO DEATH IN SAUDI ARABIA?

Faizer Shaheid

 

A verdict of death has once again been delivered in the great Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and this time it was rather a question of morality than that of murder. The unnamed Sri Lankan woman has been found guilty of fornication and has therefore been sentenced to be stoned to death. Such is the infamous Shari’a law applied in Saudi Arabia. Read more…

I WORRY ABOUT MUSLIMS

Mohammed Hanif

 

KARACHI, Pakistan — I worry about Muslims. Islam teaches me to care about all human beings, and animals too, but life is short and I can’t even find enough time to worry about all the Muslims. Read more…

INDIA UNDER MODI IS LIVING THROUGH A DARK AGE: PROFESSOR DN JHA

Teesta Setalvad, of Communalism Combat interviews Professor DN Jha on Dietary Traditions in Early India, the calculated mis-representation of Early Indian and Medieval History by the present government under the direct control of the Sangh Parivar and the ‘dark age ‘ of Superstition and un-Reason being promoted by the current political dispensation. Read more…

EDITORIAL: APRES BIHAR

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The triumphal drive of the Hindutva chariot, which began in May 2014, has been slowed  by the massive victory of the Grand Alliance in the Bihar election. The very Gandhian type of civil disobedience exhibited by Indian writers, artists, scientists and intellectuals who have returned very publicly their awards and honors in protest at the intolerant and thuggish acts of the Sangh Parivar has further tarnished the luster of the Modi regime; the poor fellow now has to run abroad to gather approbation from the likes of the British Tory Cameron or the hawkish Israeli Zionist Netanyahu. Read more…

GROWING INTOLERANCE

Neha Dabhade & Irfan Engineer

 

Recently in an interview at an award function, Amir Khan, mentioned that his wife, Kiran asked him whether they should leave the country. To Amir Khan, the statement of his wife was disastrous and indicated growing intolerance in the country. Though we condemn any such sweeping statement coming from a celebrity idolized by millions in the country, one must without politicizing the statement, reflect over the context it was made in. The Indian Prime Minister in London rightly pointed out, “India is full of diversity. This diversity is our pride and it is our strength. Diversity is the speciality of India.” (Indian Express, Nov 14, 2015). Read more…

MEASURE OF THE MAN – WHY MODI LOVES HOOPLA

Bharat Bhushan

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come back to India somewhat rejuvenated, his love for the grandiose nurtured by the attention, admiration and adulation bestowed on him by British Indians and the British Prime Minister himself, at London’s Wembley Stadium. Read more…

GENDER BENDER IN BIHAR: WHY WOMEN VOTED AGAINST MODI IN THE RECENT BIHAR ELECTIONS

Ruchira Gupta

 

For 20-year-old Nageena, a college student in Patna, life is about possibilities. She dreams of becoming an engineer.

 

For the first ten years of her life, she ran ragged on the dirt path of a red-light district in Forbesganj, Bihar. Her home, a mud hut had no doors, no roof, no toilet, no drinking water and no electricity. She could not read right or write, used to feel hungry all the time, was scared to go to the local school. Read more…

BANGLADESH: TRUTH BE DAMNED – THE ’OTHER’ IS ALWAYS THE CULPRIT

Mahfuz Anam

 

The PM blames Khaleda, the BNP chief blames Hasina, the killers continue to kill, the victims’ families live in fear, people remain confused and angry, friends of Bangladesh watch in disbelief and the smile of our enemies grow wider. So what more needs to happen to wake us up to the challenges we now face in our ’Sonar Bangla’? Read more…

THE SANGH AND THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA’S FREEDOM

Teesta Setalvad

 

On November 28, 2015, two days ago, the general secretary of the CPI-M, Sitaram Yechury, made an impassioned speech while speaking on the occasion of the Constitution Day debate, in the Rajya Sabha. Challenging this government governed by the ideology that aspires to a theocratic nation, he said that the motive behind this government’s observance of Constitution Day was that it wished to ‘re-write history” and “worm its way” into the history of the national movement and the struggle for India’s freedom. Communalism Combat brings to you a thoroughly researched investigation by Teesta Setalvad into the role of the Hindu right in India’s battle for freedom against British rule. This is part of the introduction to Beyond Doubt – A Dossier on Gandhi’s assassination published by Tulika Books in January this year. Read more…

HERE’S THE REAL REASON THE RAM JANMABHOOMI MOVEMENT IS DEAD

Aakar Patel

 

In December 1988, I was at MS University in Baroda when Arun Shourie arrived to praise the Hindutva leadership. He was then a Ram Janmabhoomi enthusiast and made a speech to a packed auditorium stressing how reason able its demands were. Hindutva was not about vandalism, he assured us. Why , Muslims could even dismantle their mosque and take it away , he said, (as if it were made of Lego) because to them the land beneath wasn’t sacred. For Hindus on the other hand, he insisted, the construction of this temple was an article of faith. Read more…

NEPAL APPEALS TO U.N. TO HELP LIFT ECONOMIC BLOCKADE

Thalif Deen

 

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 30 2015 (IPS) – A coalition of independent Nepali citizens – including diplomats, journalists, women’s rights leaders, medical doctors and former U.N. officials – is calling on the international community and the United Nations to take “effective steps” to help remove an “economic blockade” imposed on Nepal. Read more…

SRI LANKA: THE OTHER OPPRESSED MINORITY

Ahilan Kadirgamar

 

25 years since the eviction of 75,000 Muslims by the Tamil Tigers from Sri Lanka’s North, the livelihood concerns of this marginalised section remain neglected. It is time for the political elite — both Sinhala and Tamil — to probe their own consciences and evolve a more inclusive resettlement framework. Read more…

EDITORIAL: KILLING AUTHORS, AND BEEF EATERS

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Culture wars in the illiberal atmosphere of Modi’s India have taken a turn for the violent. First, we had the targeted murders of rationalists by religious extremists. Eminent thinkers like MM Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare were murdered with impunity by Hindutva goons. Prof Kalburgi’s murder was not even condemned initially by the Sahitya Akademi, an institution that had once conferred on him one of India’s top literary honors. Read more…

THREE MURDERS AND A LYNCHING

Ram Puniyani

 

Laws of nature cannot be applied to human society so directly. Still sometimes these have been used to explain-justify social catastrophes, “When a big tree falls. Earth shakes (in the aftermath of anti-Sikh massacre 1984), ‘every action has equal and opposite reaction’ (during Gujarat carnage of 2002) are too well known. Read more…

FROM BABRI TO DADRI: STOP PLAYING WITH LIVES AND RIGHTS OF MINORITIES

Dr. Noorjehan Safia Niaz

 

Bharatiya Muslim MahilaAndolan [BMMA] along with Bharat BachaoAndolan, Police Reforms Watch, VidyarthiBharti, Phule-AmbedkarManch and JagrutKamgaarManch is organizing a press conference to protest against the increasing low scale harassment of Muslim youth in Mumbai and the increasing intolerance towards the Muslim community.  Given below are a few instances that have happened in the last one week. Read more…

EIGHT THINGS NEPALIS DISLIKE ABOUT INDIAN INTERFERENCE

The ‘unofficial blockade’ imposed by India against Nepal expressing its discontent over the newly adopted constitution in Nepal has sparked anti- India sentiments in Nepal. Read more…

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR

Keki Daruwala

 

[The eminent poet is the latest to add his voice to the rising chorus of protests against the silence of the country’s premium literary body on the murder of professor MM Kalburgi]. Read more…

INDIA’S ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH

Sonia Faleiro

 

London — In today’s India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.

 

In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions. Read more…

PAKISTAN – LAW AND LAWYERS

THE law in Pakistan is sometimes far from safe in the hands of lawyers.

 

A section of the country’s legal fraternity — notwithstanding a number of courageous and upright individuals within its midst — has evolved into a formidable pressure group and many of its members have, time and again, thought nothing of flouting even fundamental rights to achieve their objectives. Read more…

HINDUTVA FASCISTS AND BARBARIC ZIONISTS ARE NATURAL PARTNERS!

Anand Singh

 

Last year, when Israel was carrying out one of the most barbaric genocides of this century by bombarding the Gaza strip, justice-loving people across the world, including India, were out on streets to protest. But it was the same time, when frenzied triumphalism of Hindutva fascists was at its peak in the corridors of power. Now more than a year has elapsed since the Hindutva fascists came to power in India under the leadership of Narendra Modi. As expected, the BJP government has made it clear through its conduct in the last one year that Hindutva fascists and Zionists are the ideological kins. To strengthen this bonhomie, Narendra Modi has announced his visit to Israel. As a gesture of friendship, Modi government has thrice abstained from voting in United Nations in the last three months, instead of voting against Israel. Read more…

BOMBING OF AFGHAN HOSPITAL IS A WAR CRIME

Kathy Kelly

 

Before the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing in Iraq, a group of activists living in Baghdad would regularly go to city sites that were crucial for maintaining health and well-being in Baghdad, such as hospitals, electrical facilities, water purification plants, and schools, and string large vinyl banners between the trees outside these buildings which read: “To Bomb This Site Would Be A War Crime.” We encouraged people in U.S. cities to do the same, trying to build empathy for people trapped in Iraq, anticipating a terrible aerial bombing. Read more…

GENDER EQUALITY SHOULD GUIDE THE PROCESS OF REFORMING FAMILY LAWS AND NOT NATIONAL INTEGRATION

Irfan Engineer

 

Supreme Court of India has yet again asked the Union Government to file affidavit and state whether it intended to bring Uniform Civil Code (UCC for brevity). In the Shah Bano Judgment (Shah Bano v. Mohammad Ahmed Khan, 1985) the Supreme Court observed “It is a matter of regret that Article 44 of the Constitution has remained a dead letter”. In Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India (1995), similar observations were made. Though the Supreme Court takes on the role of a reformer assuming lack of courage in the political class, it is only the legislature that can bring in the UCC. Read more…

ROMILA THAPAR’S LECTURE ON SECULARISM IN MUMBAI OCT. 26, 2015

Prof. Romila Thapar’s Lecture on Secularism in Mumbai, under the auspices of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, in memory of the Centre’s founder, late Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, was a resounding success. Read more…

REPORT OF DR. ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER MEMORIAL PUBLIC LECTURE

The Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial public lecture was organized by the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS) and delivered by eminent historian Romila Thapar on 26^th October 2015 at KC College Auditorium in Mumbai. The lecture was chaired by prominent academician, Prof. Jairus Banaji. This lecture on the topic of “Indian Society and the Secular” was delivered by Romila Thapar also at Jamia Milia Islamia University at Delhi in August 2015. Read more…

EDITORIAL: THE NATION’S TRAJECTORY

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Modi’s gyrations in the U.S. in the company of assorted tech tycoons in Silicon Valley exhibit his desperation to connect with his followers and cheerleaders, who now seem to be mostly in the diaspora, as a way of compensating for his lackluster performance at home.  Facebook, Google, and Microsoft executives are embracing him because their markets at home are saturating and they are looking for other opportunities to make money. It is interesting that the rosier accounts of his trip are all in the Indian media, which is still in thrall to him, while the mainstream U.S. press appears to have mostly ignored him. Read more…

WALK BEFORE YOU SPRINT

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

 

India doesn’t need M-governance or e-governance. It needs governance. India doesn’t need smart cities. Just cities that Europe and America would recognise as such. Read more…

ON THE NEPAL CONSTITUTION

THE adoption of a federal, democratic and secular Constitution in Nepal is a historic occasion. The protracted struggle of the Nepalese people against feudal authoritarianism and for democracy has culminated in the establishment of a federal, democratic and secular state. Eight years after the interim Constitution, after a tortuous political process, the Constituent Assembly voted overwhelmingly (507 out of 601) to approve the Constitution. We congratulate the people of Nepal, the three major political parties – the Nepali Congress, the CPN(UML) and the UCPN(M) – and all democratic forces for this significant achievement. Read more…

FOR SANATAN SANSTHA, NATION IS GOD’S KINGDOM

Shruti Ganapatye

 

Emphasising that spirituality is the base for everything, the Sanatan Sanstha has envisioned religious rule in the country, which according to it is the best solution to “all ongoing problems”. The organisation in its literature has stated the current electoral system in the country — according to them — has “no place in Indian culture”. Read more…

LOOKING AT THE PAST: JAUNDICED VIEWS

Ram Puniyani

 

Using the jaundiced version of the past is one of the biggest tools of communal forces. The prevalence of hatred towards ‘other’ communities is rooted in the versions of past which are part carry over from the past legacy introduced by British and part constructed by the communalists, who in turn ‘select’ the incidents and distort it in such a way so as to fit in their scheme of things. The same incident may be interpreted from opposite angles by competing communal ideology. Read more…

CORBYN AND DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM

M K Bhadrakumar

 

An extraordinary thing happened in the Left politics in Britain and in the southern State of Kerala last week. There are similarities and dissimilarities between what happened in the two situations so far apart. But it gives much food for thought for all Leftist workers and their leaders as well as the fellow-travellers of the Left in India. Read more…

WOMEN’S VOICES FROM ATALI

Dr. Sandhya Mhatre and Neha Dabhade

 

A fact finding team consisting of Adv. Irfan Engineer, and these writers, visited the riot torn village of Atali and dwelled into the causes, contentions and nuanced positions of different stakeholders after two bouts of violence on 25th May and 1st July 2015 in the village. Read more…

PATEL-PATIDAR AGITATION

 

 

Ghanshyam Shah is a sociologist known for his work on social movements, land reforms and untouchability. Over the past decade, he has been examining the Gujarat model of development and its human costs. A keen observer of deprivation and development in India, he has closely followed the socio-economic transitions of Gujarat. Read more…

IN MY RELIGION, MEAT IS MA KALI’S PRASAD’: A SHAKTO HINDU OBJECTS TO ENFORCED VEGETARIANISM

Garga Chatterjee

 

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation will enforce a two-day ban on the sale of meat and shut its slaughter-house during the Jain festival of Paryushan. Gurgaon in Haryana also has such a ban. Thankfully, I live in the jurisdiction of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, where chickens, goats and cows can be slaughtered all the time and sold throughout the city without sensitivities being ruffled. However, the meat bans put into place in several other Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states in response to the demands of their political backers are worrisome to my faith and me. Read more…

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE WITHIN THE SANGH PARIVAR

Irfan Engineer

 

Our PM Narendra Modi travels across the globe soliciting global capital to make in India and announces various deals making India a very attractive destination for multinational capital to earn its dream profits. Read more…

WHEN IT COMES TO INDIAN HISTORY, AMAR CHITRA KATHA IS THE NEW NORMAL: VISITING THE ‘RIG VEDA TO ROBOTICS’ EXHIBITION

Kai Friese

 

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi departed on his latest foreign mission to spread the word about Digital India in Silicon Valley, I embarked on a more nostalgic excursion to visit Rabindra Bhavan, one of the landmarks of Nehruvian modernism in New Delhi. My intended mission was one of architectural curiosity but I stumbled instead into the wormhole of an exhibit recently inaugurated by the Minister of Culture, Mahesh Sharma in Rabindra Bhavan’s art galleries. It was entitled Cultural Continuity from Rig Veda to Robotics. Read more…

GHADAR ALLIANCE STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO IMPENDING VISIT BY PRIME MINISTER MODI TO THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

San Francisco, CA

 

Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, visits the San Francisco Bay area this weekend and is being celebrated by sections of the Indian diaspora. Mr. Modi was banned from entry into the United States from 2005 to 2014 on the stated grounds of “assaults on religious freedom” in connection with the 2002 Gujarat massacres, and now visits the country owing to his diplomatic status. Read more…

‘IT IS WITH THESE MEN ALONE THAT THE GATES OF HEAVEN SHALL OPEN FOR ME’

Anirban Mitra

 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the pan-continental attempts by Indian revolutionaries to launch an armed revolt against the British Read more…

EDITORIAL: SOUTH ASIA AT THE PERPETUAL CROSSROADS

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The current issue of the INSAF Bulletin highlights issues across the South Asian spectrum, from the elections in Sri Lanka to the constitutional crisis in Nepal, and from the investigation of Sabeen Mahmud’s murder in Pakistan to the targeting of secular bloggers in Afghanistan. In India, the Bihar elections and growing inequality highlight the wobbly support for Narendra Modi. We also include a detailed and appreciative obituary of Praful Bidwai, highlighting his role as an activist in the nuclear debates. Read more…

CHATRAPATI SHIVAJI MAHARAJ: TO EACH ONES’ OWN!

Ram Puniyani

 

Some concerned citizens have filed a Public Interest Litigation (August 17 2015) to stop the highest award of Maharashtra Government, Maharashtra Bhushan to Babasaheb Purandare. Purandare is known for his work ‘Raja Shivaji Chatrapati’ and the play ‘Jaanata Raja’ (wise king) his is not the first time that such a controversy around Purandare has come up. Read more…

IS INEQUALITY IN INDIA HERE TO STAY?

Vamsi Vakulabharanam

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to narrow the gap between Indian elites and the rest of the population.

 

India has experienced a significant economic growth spurt in recent decades. After seeing annual growth of 3 percent in the years after independence in 1947, the rate began to double, reaching a rate of around 6 percent per year after 1980. However, the distribution of growth proceeds has been very uneven across different constituents of the Indian population. Read more…

BOOK WITHDRAWAL GAME

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/gujarat-pulls-books-with-anti-hindu-ambedkar-remarks/

 

Gujarat withdraws books with ‘anti-Hindu’ Ambedkar remarks – See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/gujarat-pulls-books-with-anti-hindu-ambedkar-remarks/#sthash.WHMtTVgC.dpuf Read more…

A CONSISTENT, PRINCIPLED AND KNOWLEDGEABLE CRITIC: PRAFUL BIDWAI ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ENERGY

M. V. Ramana

 

For about four decades, the late Praful Bidwai, no stranger to the readers of this journal, has written prodigiously on various aspects of nuclear weapons and energy. Even for someone as widely published as Praful, the sheer volume of his output is noteworthy. One could classify his writings into four categories: critiques of nuclear energy, dangers associated with nuclear weapons, nuclear diplomacy (pertaining both to weapons and energy), and chronicles of people’s resistance movements. These are not watertight compartments and many articles might be classified in more than one category; others may not quite fit in any. Read more…

SALUTING COURAGE: MEMORIAL FOR VASANT RAJAB

Ram Puniyani

 

Gujarat violence (2002) was horrific. In this, after the burning of train in Godhra in which 58 innocents died, the same tragedy was made the pretext to launch the massive violence in which over one thousand people perished. In the aftermath of that I got many occasions to visit different parts of Gujarat and also to come to know about two legendary youth who had laid down their life to protect the people when the communal violence was going on in Ahmadabad in July 1946. These two young men, Vasant Rao Hegishte and Rajab Ali Lakhani, close friends and workers of Congress Seva Dal, came to the streets to stop the killings. Vasant Rao trying to protect Muslims and Rajab Ali stood firm to save the Hindus. Both were done to death by the mobs. Read more…

WHY ARE THEY HOUNDING TEESTA SETALVAD NOW?

K.P. Sasi

 

The first time I met Javed Anand was in the early eighties. I met him since my close friend Paul Kurien used to admire the significance of his work. Javed used to be part of a documentation centre at that time. Paul Kurien who was a brilliant mind is a deep memory even now for many common friends. I found Javed as a deeply reflective person, who is extremely focused in his work, warm and compassionate. Read more…

2.87 MILLION INDIANS HAVE NO FAITH, CENSUS REVEALS FOR FIRST TIME

Sivakumar B

 

CHENNAI: India has 2.87 million people who have no faith in any religion — 0.24% of the country’s population of 1.21 billion — according to the 2011 census, which was the first to include a ‘non-faith’ category. The figure includes atheists, rationalists as well as those not interested in any religion but believe in some ‘unknown’ force. Read more…

BANGLADESH ISLAMISTS THREATENED BY SECULAR BLOGGERS ?- MINORITIES HIT AS GOVT WOOS ISLAMISTS

Imran H Sarker

 

Bangladesh is being roiled by gruesome murders targeting its secular blogger ommunity. Imran H Sarker is spokesperson for Bangladesh’s Shahbag movement which demanded maximum puni hment for 1971’s war criminals. Speaking with Rudroneel Ghosh, Sarker discussed why bloggers are being killed, the knowing apathy of political parties ? and how this inks to attacks on religious minorities. Read more…

THE BATTLE FOR SRI LANKA: BETWEEN A COMMUNAL / MAJORITARIAN VIEW VERSUS A MULTI-ETHNIC, PLURAL AND DEMOCRATIC VISION

Jayadeva Uyangoda

 

Putinization Has Been Stopped but Sri Lanka Needs a New Ideological Project.

 

The possibility of the Rajapaksa-led opposition using Sinhalese communalism to unsettle and undermine the new government of moderates is actually very real. Read more…

THE BATTLE FOR BIHAR: THE RELEASE OF RELIGIOUS CENSUS FIGURES BETRAYS THE BJP’S NERVOUSNESS

Anita Katyal

 

The party does not seem to be sure of its Modi magic working by itself and is likely to use the census data to fuel fear of a Muslim upsurge to consolidate its Hindu vote. Read more…

SABEEN MAHMUD: ANATOMY OF A MURDER

Naziha Syed Ali and| Fahim Zaman

 

It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F. Read more…

NEPAL’S CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS: IT’S TIME TO DROP THE ARROGANCE

Prashant Jha

 

Even as the Indian foreign policy establishment has been busy with the Sri Lankan elections and the NSA level talks with Pakistan, trouble has broken out right across the open border in Nepal. Protests for a particular form of federal demarcation have turned violent in the western district of Kailali, and several people have been killed – among them 6 policemen and 3 civilians. Unofficial reports put the figure at over 20. If the higher figures turn out to be correct, the state has not faced this scale of violence ever since the civil war ended in 2006. Read more…

YAKUB MEMON’S HANGING AND THE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE

Vinod Mubayi

 

The midnight vigil at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi failed. The 2.30 a.m. wake up call for justice addressed to the Chief Justice of India by eminent lawyers like Indira Jaising and civil society organizations failed.The Indian justice system, which Memon trusted enough to return to the country with his family, was shown to be a complete fraud. Read more…

EDITORIAL: DEFENDING SABRANG, DEFENDING INDIA’S PLURAL LEGACY

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

As this issue of the INSAF Bulletin goes to press, the case against Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand of the Citizens for Justice and Peace and SABRANG foundation has begun to acquire greater urgency. Read more…

TERRORISM AND INDIAN MUSLIMS

Irfan Engineer

 

In an interview to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria ahead of his US visit, Prime Minister Modi said that Indian Muslims would live and die for India and would not want to do anything bad for India. (Express News Service, 2014). Read more…

FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

Nishita Jha

 

Asaram Bapu rape case: As witnesses die, this family is keeping its hopes for justice alive.

 

The family whose daughter was allegedly raped by the self-styled godman lives in a state of siege, under perennial threat. But they have decided to fight on. Read more…

CLAMPING DOWN

Kalpana Sharma

 

Modi government’s hounding of Teesta Setalvad is a message to all dissidents.

 

The numerous cases foisted on her have little substance but are intended to paralyse work to seek justice for the victims of the Gujarat riots. Read more…

INDIA: MAJORITY RULE

Hartosh Singh Bal

 

The BJP’s view of democracy comes into conflict with the values of a constitutional republic Read more…

PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SECULARISM (PADS)

Statement by People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism following CBI raid at Sabrang Communications and homes of its editors and publishers Read more…

SOFT HINDUTVA AND HARD HINDUTVA

Irfan Engineer

 

The theme of the NDA Govt. seems to be – lavish spending on cultural events, tax cuts for the corporate India and cuts in budgets on social welfare touching the poor, peasants, dalits, adivasis, women and other weaker sections. Read more…

STOP YAKUB MEMON’S HANGING

People’s Union For Democratic Rights

 

On 15th July, the Maharashtra government announced that it has initiated the process for hanging Yakub Memon. Read more…

This issue of the bulletin is dedicated to the memory of Praful Bidwai (1949-2015) who passed away unexpectedly on June 24.

CULTURAL NATIONALISM IN MODI’S INDIA

Raza Mir

 

The Modi government declared June 21 “World Yoga Day,” and while steady pressure from secular elements in civil society forced it off its initial plan to make it mandatory for government employees, it has plans to make yoga compulsory for police officers and paramilitary forces in the near future. Several low-grade assaults on plural culture have marked the Modi era. These include the beef ban enacted in Maharashtra in April 2015, the reiteration by the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat of the tired trope that “all Indians are Hindus”, the escalation of ghar vapsi programs aimed at coercive conversion of indigent minorities, scare tactics against inter-religious marriages by labeling them love jihad, and the imputation that the Indian population can be divided into the binary between Ramzada and haramzada made by a minister. These acts of menace have been supported by low-level riots such as the arson attack on five churches in New Delhi in December 2014, the burning down of Muslim homes and shops in the Trilokpuri locality of eastern New Delhi in October 2014, or the May 2015 act of burning down 150 homes belonging to Muslims in Ballabhgarh, Haryana. The strategy appears to be one of minimizing loss of life while maximizing loss of property, so as to stay below the radar of the global press. All these diverse data points intensify the feeling that the cultural nationalist strand of the BJP (led often by the RSS) has begun to flex its muscles. Read more…

PRAFUL BIDWAI (1949-2015): VOICE OF SANITY AND COMMITMENT IS NO MORE

Vinod Mubayi

 

Praful passed away very unexpectedly in Amsterdam of cardiac arrest a few days ago. He had gone there to attend a meeting of the Transnational Institute of which he was a member. Read more…

TRIUMPHALISM OVER MYANMAR RAID

Praful Bidwai

 

The debate over the June 9 raids by the Indian Army’s Special Forces unit against two Northeastern insurgent groups on Myanmarese territory has produced two main reactions. The first reaction, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s diehard supporters, is triumphalist and holds that the retaliatory operation’s “great” success against National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang) rebels must be trumpeted. The second reaction defends the present covert operation, but believes that publicising such operations is unwise, even self-defeating. Read more…

LALOO’S ‘POISON’ OR NITISH’S ELIXIR? SIGNIFICANCE OF BIHAR ELECTIONS

Praful Bidwai

 

Has a secular anti-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance at last been sealed in Bihar, following Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Laloo Prasad’s declaration that he would consume “poison” by fighting the coming Assembly elections jointly with the Janata Dal (United) and the Congress, and proposing Nitish Kumar as its Chief Ministerial candidate in the presence of JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav? Read more…

THE IIT-M EPISODE SHOWS AMBEDKAR CAN NEVER BE A HINDUTVA ICON

Praful Bidwai

 

The ugly controversy triggered by the decision by the Dean of Students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to de-recognise the student body Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle has ended. The Institute director restored its recognition following a spate of protests in numerous cities by students and political parties, and a meeting with APSC members. The conflict’s continuation would have generated protests from the international scientific community and brought more opprobrium to IIT-M. Read more…

‘ARE YOU A MULLA OR ONE OF US?’

Apoorvanand, Ali Javed and Satish Deshpande report on Atali village.

 

http://kafila.org/2015/06/18/are-you-a-mulla-or-one-of-us/#more-25557 Read more…

365 DAYS: DEMOCRACY & SECULARISM UNDER THE MODI REGIME

http://www.anhadin.net

 

Damage to India’s ethos may be irreversible, Civil Society report of One Year of Narendra Modi government Read more…

NO MERCY FOR THE POOR

Jean Drèze

 

http://thewire.in/2015/06/18/no-mercy-for-the-poor/

 

Even as it claims to be fighting the perception that it is anti-poor, the Modi government has just dealt a big blow to the poorest of the poor: the planned phasing out of the Antyodaya programme under the Targeted Public Distribution System (Control) Order 2015. This move is unjust and illegal. Read more…

PAKISTAN INDIA PEOPLES’ FORUM FOR PEACE & DEMOCRACY: PRESS STATEMENT

(Released jointly by the India & Pakistan Chapters of Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and democracy)

 

17 June 2015

 

We, the members of Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy appreciate the welcoming news from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call with his counterpart Nawaz Sharif to extend his best wishes for Ramzan which starts on 18th of June, 2015. We also welcome the decision by the Indian Prime Minister to release the Pakistani Fishermen from Indian jails to spend the blessed month of Ramzan with their families. While we appreciate these welcoming decisions by the PMO, we strongly feel that these efforts to maintain friendly relations with Pakistan should be consistent and not in fits and starts. Read more…

INDIA: YOGA HOGA

Dilip Simeon

 

16 June

 

The ongoing controversy about yoga is yet another example of deceitful polemic. It began with a reminder that yoga has nothing to do with religion. Of late, however, sundry political swamis have announced that anyone who disapproves of compulsory yoga should leave the country. So now yoga is essential not only to Hinduism but to national pride. Refusal to submit to this rule is treachery. The ‘Parivar’ presumes to decide what is or is not ‘national’ and who may or may not live in India. Perhaps some energetic policemen will lodge a case of sedition against anyone refusing to perform surya-namaskar. Read more…

ATTACK ON CONSTITUTIONAL VALUES

(Newsclick interview with Harsh Mander)

 

15 June

 

http://newsclick.in/india/modi-governments-1-year-systematic-attack-constitutional-values Read more…

UNDERMINING NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS TO CREATE REGIMENTED MINDS

Irfan Engineer

 

The students of FTII are agitated over appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as President Chair of the Governing Council of the Institute. About 150 students pursuing various courses at the FTII are on an indefinite strike against the patent political appointment because of Chauhan’s affiliation with the BJP. When we google Chauhan, all the information we get is that he acted in films like Andaaz (2203), Baghban (2003) and Tumko Na Bhool Payenge (2002). Wikipedia informs us that he acted in 150 movies and 600 TV serials. However, links to only some of the movies Chauhan acted in are given and when we follow the link, often his name is not even mentioned in the star cast of the film. Chauhan claims that he has worked in 600 serials, however only one TV serial in which Chauhan acted was popular – Mahabharat where he played the role of eldest of Pandava brothers – Yuddhishthir. He may have acted in 600 episodes. Students felt that Chauhan lacked the vision, stature and experience and was not qualified for the post which was once occupied by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Girish Karnad, Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalkrishnan. Noted film makers like Anand Patwardhan have expressed their serious concern over the appointment of Chauhan when the short list included Gulzar, Shyam Benegal, Saeed Mirza and Adoor Gopalkrishnan. The previous incumbents of the Chair were winner of prestigious awards, including Padmashree, Padma Vibhushan, Sahitya Akademi, Dadasaheb Phalke, Jnanpeeth and other prestigious Awards. Gajendra Chauhan has no such credentials. There is lack of transparency in the appointment. Read more…

EGGS AND PREJUDICE: CHILD NUTRITION IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE TO SPURIOUS, LARGELY UPPER CASTE, ARGUMENTS

Reetika Khera

 

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/eggs-and-prejudice

 

Child nutrition is prime-time news only when a tragedy occurs. Child undernutrition is no less a tragedy but rarely recognised as such. Read more…

CERAS-SAWCC MEMORIAL FOR DAYA VARMA

On Sunday 7th June, CERAS (South Asia Centre) and SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Community Centre) held in Montreal, a joint memorial meeting for Daya Varma. Read more…

HAVE ACCHHE DIN (BETTER TIMES) ARRIVED? THE EVIDENCE ONE YEAR LATER

Editors

 

In his election campaign last year, Modi promised “acchhe din” (better times) for the people of India.  What is the evidence one year later? No doubt, better days have arrived for some, mainly the corporate cronies who were beneficiaries of the so-called Gujarat model of development. In this model, public assets and properties, land, water, power and so on, were essentially privatized at low cost and handed over to Friends of Modi (FOM) to make handsome profits – all in the name of development.  This model is now sought to be applied to the whole of India. Read more…

DAYA VARMA’S MEMORIAL

Editors

 

On May 2, 2015, over 100 people gathered at the Centre Funéraire Côte-Des-Neiges Inc. in Montreal to celebrate the life of Daya Varma. Stephen Orlov chaired the meeting, with speeches from around 20 of Daya’s family members, colleagues and comrades. Through the two-hour program and the various speeches therein, a composite portrait of Daya re-emerged, as a scientist, an activist, a humanist and a human being. Read more…

MODI SARKAR’S FIRST BIRTHDAY

Irfan Engineer

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will complete one year in office on 25th May 2015. His swearing-in ceremony was on 26th May 2014. PM’s achievements remain contested true to his polarising personality. While the PM’s followers exaggerate his achievements as unprecedented, his detractors can only recount the promises that remain undelivered. An honest assessment becomes difficult if not impossible. However, here we are trying to capture some trends and directions of the Central Govt. headed by PM Modi. Read more…

ONE YEAR OF MODI SARKAR: HATE SPEECH GALORE

Ram Puniyani

 

The coming to power of Narendra Modi in a way gave an open license to all the affiliates of RSS combine to indulge in open hate speech against the religious minorities. The current agenda behind the hate speech is to consolidate the communal polarization of the society along lines of religion. The well known case of MIM’s Akarbar Uddudin Owaisi’s hate speech has been despicable and very rightly Akbarudin Owaisi had to be in jail for some time. The case against him should be pursued and the legal course of action must be followed.  At the same time what about the hate speech indulged in by the likes of Pravin Togadia, Subramaniam Swami, Giriraj Singh, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sadhvi Prachi, Sakshi Mahraraj, Yogi Adityanth, Sanjay Raut and company? Read more…

INDIA: MODI GOVERNMENT – ONE YEAR OF DISMANTLING THE WELFARE STATE

Harsh Mander

 

A dominant feature of the first year of Narendra Modi’s leadership is the quiet dismantling of India’s imperfectly realised framework of welfare and rights, covertly, by stealth. Read more…

MEDIA JINGOISM ALIENATES NEPALIS: RISE OF ‘THE UGLY INDIAN’?

Praful Bidwai

 

Barely two weeks after a major earthquake which killed more than 8,000 people, Nepal suffered a powerful aftershock, adding to its misery and killing over 100 people. More than 3.5 million people are still in need of food assistance; 479,000 houses have been destroyed and 263,000 damaged; and only five percent of the $415 million aid Nepal needs has reached it. Given the extensive destruction and caving in of hill roads, it has been near-impossible to reach relief material to those in dire need. Read more…

RTI IS BEING SABOTAGED BY NOT ALLOCATING ENOUGH RESOURCES TO MAKE IT WORK

Shailesh Gandhi

 

India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act has caught the imagination of people in this country, while being appreciated across the world. A great change has come in India this decade in the power equation between the sovereign citizens of the country and those in power. This change is just beginning and if we can sustain and strengthen it, our defective elective democracy could metamorphose, within the next one or two decades, into a country where the promise of democracy is actualised. Read more…

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

Ramachandra Guha

 

Smriti Irani is by far the most controversial cabinet minister, and with good reason, writes noted historian Ramachandra Guha.

 

When, a year ago, Smriti Irani was first chosen as the Union minister for human resource development, I did not share in the general scepticism about her appointment. I had seen HRD ministers in UPA governments, with a string of foreign degrees themselves, display a conspicuous lack of interest in their portfolio. Irani seemed energetic and articulate; perhaps keenness and interest would trump lack of formal academic qualifications. Read more…

RESIST DEGRADATION OF INDIAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. RETIRED JUDGE JYOTSANA YAGNIK THREATENED; MURDER CONVICTS OUT ON BAIL

sacw.net

 

 

The undersigned civil society organizations and concerned citizens have taken serious note of a news report (IE May 11, 2015) about the intimidation of a retired judge, Ms Jyotsana Yagnik, who, in her capacity as special judge had, in August 2012, convicted former Gujarat BJP minister Maya Kodnani, former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi and 30 others in the 2002 massacre of 97 Muslims in Naroda Patiya. Ms Yagnik has received at least 22 threat letters since the verdict, as well as blank phone calls at her home. The 62 year old judge has informed the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team about the threats and phone calls, but instead of strengthening her protection, the government has scaled down her security cover. Read more…

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND AN INSECURE PAKISTAN

Ayesha Ijaz Khan

 

 

A wise man once said, “I am not sure if Pakistan was created in the name of religion but it sure is being destroyed in the name of religion.” The bus attack in Karachi claiming at least 45 innocent Ismaili lives is just one in a series of such heinous religiously-motivated atrocities that Pakistanis continue to face on a regular basis. Whether the victims are the Hazaras of Quetta, Christians of Youhanabad in Lahore, Bohras offering Friday prayers in Karachi, or the children targeted in the Army Public School attack in Peshawar, the root cause is the same. It is the belief that one has a right to judge others based on their faith and if they are determined religiously deviant (as in the case of other sects or religions) or religiously wanting (as in the case of the majority sect), then they are fair game. Read more…

PIPFPD CONDEMNS THE BRUTAL ATTACK ON ISMAILI COMMUNITY IN KARACHI

PRESS STATEMENT

 

 

Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace & Democracy (PIPFPD) strongly condemns the brutal attack in Karachi where 47 people including women were gunned down. The attackers targetted an Ismaili community bus. Jundullah, an anti-Shia militia and a splinter group of Tehrik-e-Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack. Read more…

MASS MURDER OF ISMAILIS BY FUNDAMENTALIST TERRORISTS IN PAKISTAN

Committee of Progressive Pakistani-Canadians

 

The Committee of Progressive Pakistani-Canadians offers its deepest condolences to the families of the victims of the terrorist attack on May 13 in Karachi and to the religious community they belonged to, the Ismaili Muslims. We strongly condemn the perpetrators – religious fundamentalist terrorists who claim to be Muslims – of this cowardly attack on innocent and defenseless women and men. Read more…

A TRIBUTE AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY: REMEMBERING PEOPLE’S HISTORIAN AMALENDU GUHA (1924-2015)

sacw.net

 

Bonojit Hussain and Mayur Chetia

 

I have no desire for heaven,

Instead I go to the brewhouse,

Gamblers, drunkards, prostitutes – bringing them together

I sing of hope, sprinkling ashes from my soul’s pyre:

In flocks the phoenix flies to the sky.

 

— My Poetry” Amalendu Guha 1960 Read more…

LAND BILL’S PROSPECTIVE BURIAL: GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH

Editors

 

At the time of going to press, it seems likely that the infamous Land Acquisition Bill proposed in the Indian parliament, which had emerged as a major ideological test for the Narendra Modi government, is hurtling toward a swift demise. A coalition of political parties, motivated by a groundswell of farmer protests, have declared their opposition to it, underscoring its pro-rich character, and as a naked example of the intensification of the processes of “accumulation by dispossession” in the country. Read more…

GAJENDRA SINGH’S DEATH SPARKS TRAGIC MEMORIES OF MANDAL SELF-IMMOLATIONS OF 1990

Ajaz Ashraf

 

Then, like now, the government attempted to attribute the suicides to personal difficulties. To buy those stories would be to ignore the deep structural problems that have caused acute rural distress.

 

The apparent suicide of Gajendra Singh Kalyanvat at the Aam Aadmi Party rally in Delhi on Wednesday (April 22 – eds.) is reminiscent of the self-immolations committed in protest against the implementation of reservations for OBCs in 1990. Then as now, a self-inflicted death has become the feeble scream of the helpless, amplified through extensive media coverage. Read more…

CLAIMING AMBEDKAR, TRASHING THE CONSTITUTION: PARIVAR’S CRASS HYPOCRISY

Praful Bidwai

 

When it comes to sheer hypocrisy and double standards, it’s hard to beat the Sangh Parivar. It strenuously claimed the legacy of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a principal author of India’s Constitution, and a Dalit, on his 124th birth anniversary. This was motivated by nothing nobler than the coming election in Bihar, where a Dalit (former stopgap Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manzhi) has emerged as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s potential ally against Messrs Nitish Kumar and Laloo Prasad. Read more…

SUPPRESSION OF POETS IN MAHARASHTRA

Released by Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association

 

On April 10, 2015 Bombay High court refused bail to Sachin Mali, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor of Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), who have remained in jail for two years without a trial. They are not charged with committing violence, or possessing weapons or contraband; it was their singing and their songs that were found unlawful. Read more…

COW SLAUGHTER BAN FOR SCIENTIFIC ANIMAL HUSBANDRY OR FOR CULTURAL NATIONALIST STATE?

Irfan Engineer

 

In the previous articles we saw that the campaign by the Hindu nationalist organizations for cow protection is merely instrumental to achieve their political objective, establish cultural hegemony of the upper caste and declare the hierarchical and feudal culture privileging the upper caste as the national culture. The amendments passed by the Maharashtra Assembly in 1995 to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act, 1976, and which received Presidential assent in 2015 (hereafter referred to as “the 2015 Act”), too are not to protect the cow and its progeny despite the stated objectives couched language of scientific organization of agriculture and animal husbandry. The political objective of the 2015 Act is instrumental – to impose the hegemony of upper caste culture and empower extremist, anarchic and fringe Hindu nationalist groups to intimidate the marginalized sections, in particular, the Muslims on one hand, and to construct a hegemonic and authoritarian culture monitoring state. Read more…

INDIA’S POVERTY IS SOCIAL VIOLENCE

Harsh Mander

 

There are many exiles faced by India’s poor. They are exiled from the consciences of the people of privilege and wealth. They are exiled from our cinema, television and newspapers. They are exiled from the priorities of public expenditure and governments. They are exiled from debates in Parliament and offices. They are exiled from institutions that could offer them some basic security through education, healthcare and social security. And they are exiled from the hope that their children or their grandchildren will one day escape a life of backbreaking toil and social humiliation. Read more…

COLOR CODING OF COMMUNAL POLITICS

Ram Puniyani

 

As per the reports from Ahmadabad (12th April 2015) the uniform at Shahpur School; where most of the students are Hindus; is saffron and the color of uniform in Dani Limda school where almost all the students are Muslims; the color is green. This is absolutely shocking! One knew that the ghettoization of Muslims in Ahmadabad is probably the worst in the country but whether the things will go this far was unbelievable. The process of communalization which worsened after the 2002 Gujarat carnage is seeing a new low with incidents like this one. Read more…

THE JANATA PARIVAR INITIATIVE

Pritam Singh

 

The proposal for a third alternative, opposed both to the Congress and the BJP, continues to retain significance in the political landscape of India. The recent coming together of some regional parties that have roots in India’s socialist political tradition has again given boost to the prospects of a third alternative in Indian politics. The continuing turmoil in AAP, which could have been imagined as a possible third alternative, further adds significance to the Janata Parivar initiative. It cannot be ruled out that in future AAP, united or divided, the BSP and the Left parties can also be a part of a powerful third alternative. Read more…

SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM VICTORY’S JAWS? AAP’S DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

Praful Bidwai

 

Less than two months after it scored a spectacular victory in the Delhi elections to stop the Narendra Modi juggernaut, the Aam Aadmi Party got drawn into an ugly, bruising internal conflict which led to the expulsion of two of its best-known leaders from the national executive. Read more…

THE SIN AND THE ERROR

Ravi Sinha

 

“…it takes an error to father a sin.”

– J. Robert Oppenheimer

 

Future historians of India may well describe the past year as a year of political sin. This was the year in which the man who had earlier presided over the Gujarat Carnage was awarded the ultimate prize. The year saw an election that touched a new low marked by shallowness, vulgarities and lies – in no small measure by the labors of the man himself. Equally appalling have been the exertions of a large class of literati and glitterati to portray philistinism and inanities spouted by the most powerful mouth as wisdom of a visionary leader. Read more…

DAYA RAM VARMA: AN UNFORGETTABLE FRIEND

Iqbal Niazi – New Delhi

 

 

My association with Daya Ram began nearly 65 years ago in 1949-50 when I first came to know him while he was a studying at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow for the MBBS and MD degrees. My sister, Habib Bano, was also a student at the same Medical College during the same years. Between 1949-53, I completed my M.Sc. in Zoology and had become a demonstrator-cum-research student at AMU, Aligarh. During those years I had to come to Lucknow from Aligarh frequently in connection with the activities of the CPI and the U.P. Students Federation of which I was then the President.  It is during these visits that I first came to know Daya Ram then as one of a group of active workers, members and sympathizers of the Lucknow Branch of All India Students Federation and the then undivided Communist Party of India. The group consisted of a number of university students to name some:  Ravi, Robin Mitra, Anirudh Gupta, Yudhishtra, Krishnanand Bhatnagar (Anand also known as Kailash), P.C.  Joshi, Ruby, Khadija, Atiya, and medical students including my sister Habib Bano and Sharda Paul, and also some teachers of the medical college including Dr. N.P.Gupta (Pathology), Dr. P.C. Chaudhury (Physiology) and others. Many of the comrades of those days are no more. Read more…

MODI’S DEAFENING SILENCE ON ACTIVIST ASSASSINATIONS

Prachi Patankar

 

If left unchallenged, a hateful far-right ideology will shatter the dream of a pluralistic and democratic India. Read more…

POEM: I GIVE YOU THE BULLET TRAIN

BADRI RAINA

 

Are you hungry, are you in pain?

Come, I’ll feed you the bullet train. Read more…

DR. DAYA RAM VARMA (August 23, 1929 – March 22, 2015)

Editors

 

It is with great sadness that we announce the demise of the Founding Editor of INSAF Bulletin, Dr. Daya Ram Varma, who passed away on March 22, 2015 after a battle with lung cancer.  By any measure, Daya was an extraordinary person: he was a leading scientist and researcher in the challenging field of pharmacology, he had a deep and abiding commitment to secular, democratic and progressive politics in India and South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora in North America, and he was an extremely warm and generous person, ready to give his time and energy to whoever, wherever and whenever someone needed help. While we deeply mourn his passing, we also recall and celebrate the long, rich, and productive life he lived. Read more…

MY FATHER DAYA VARMA

Rahul Varma

 

My father, Dr. Daya Ram Varma, was a brilliant scientist with over 225 scientific publications and two full-length books — Reason and Medicine: Art and Science of Healing from Antiquity to Modern Times, and Medicine, Healthcare and the Raj: Unacknowledged Legacy — to his credit. He was the founder, editor and key writer of several political journals, including New India Bulletin, India Now and INSAF Bulletin, and was author of a boundless stream of articles, essays, critiques and chapters in prestigious scientific books and journals. A staunch secularist and socialist, he was the featured subject in world-class documentaries such as Bhopal: Beyond Genocide (Tapan Bose, Suhasini Mulay) and Bhopal: Search for Justice (Peter Raymond, Harold Crooks). He founded, supported or influenced many progressive organizations such as the Indian Peoples’ Association in North America (IPANA), CERAS, Kabir Cultural Center, the South Asian Women’s Community Center, Teesri Duniya Theatre, and many others. He championed the cause of peace and harmony between India and Pakistan and between people from these countries living in North America. He was a one-of-a-kind activist who combined science, politics and human rights, envisioning a society built upon the foundations of peace, equality and justice. Read more…

A GREAT SOUL SERVES EVERYONE ALL THE TIME

Dipti Gupta

 

A great soul serves everyone all the time – a great soul never dies – it brings us together again and again. Since Papa’s demise on March 22, I have been overwhelmed by the number of calls and messages we have received from all his fans and friends all around the world. I say fans because those of us who knew Papa well – knew that he had a magnetic persona that attracted and inspired people. Read more…

IF THERE IS ANOTHER DAYA VARMA, PLEASE STAND UP

Rana Bose

 

If there is another Daya Varma, please stand up. And nobody shall.  The room and the world will remain silent and still. Read more…

MY FRIEND AND COMRADE DAYA

Vinod Mubayi

 

Daya was my close comrade and friend for almost 40 years and it is very difficult if not impossible to accept that he is gone.  In what follows, I try to give a brief survey of some organizations and events where our interests and energies coincided.  I knew he was a distinguished researcher and teacher in pharmacology by virtue of his professional appointment at McGill University. But his work there is described below much more knowledgeably by those he worked with or taught. Read more…

MY FRIEND, MY MENTOR IS NO MORE

Feroz Mehdi

 

I spoke with Daya the day my father died, on 2nd January, and told him I am going to India for the funeral. I came back on 16 January and spoke to Daya again a few days later. He asked me how I was doing and about the memorial meeting that was held for my father in Delhi. Then he said “You have lost your father, and I am not doing well and can die any day. So, you will be left alone …”. This was one of the many ways he showed his concern for me. Read more…

WE WILL CARRY ON WITH THE IMPORTANT WORK YOU UNDERTOOK ALL OF YOUR LIFE!

Harinder Mahil

 

It is with great sadness that I write about Daya whom I have known since 1975. I came to know Daya soon after IPANA was founded in June 1975. The Vancouver unit IPANA often discussed Daya’ articles and other writings. Read more…

DAYA WILL REMAIN AS AN INSPIRATION TO ALL WHO WALK ON THE SAME PATH

Chin Banerjee

 

I first met Daya during the first convention of Indian People’e Association in North America (IPANA)  in Vancouver in 1976. But I knew of him as one of the founders and leading spirits of the organization that was established in Montreal shortly before Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in 1975, which I joined on my return from India at the end of that year. IPANA offered me a home in diaspora when the homeland I had left had been violated by a dictatorial regime. Daya’s wise and authoritative leadership in IPANA offered me the hope of reclaiming the homeland that felt I had lost. Read more…

HE WILL ALWAYS REMAIN IN OUR HEARTS

Anand Patwardhan

 

Daya Varma was a staunch supporter of revolutionary Marxism Leninism when I first met him in 1975. An Emergency had been declared in India in June 1975 to curtail the Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) led Bihar movement. I had just completed a film on this movement and most of my colleagues were already in jail and I would likely have shared their fate but escaped by getting a teaching assistantship to do a Masters degree in Montreal. Here I put an English voice over on our film and began to show it to raise public opinion against the Emergency. Read more…

ALL HIS LIFE, DAYA REMAINED A FIGHTER

Satinath Sarangi, Sambhavna

 

(Translated from Hindi)

 

On 22 March, Sambhavna’s research advisor and supporter, Dr. Daya Ram Varma, passed away in St. Johns, Canada, in the midst of his family and friends.  Daya was born in a small village in Azamgarh district of U.P. He began his education in a one-room school, and then went on to receive his MBBS and M.D. degrees from Lucknow University’s King George Medical College. In 1959 he came to Canada to do his Ph.D. in pharmacology and after obtaining his degree from McGill University he began teaching there and was a professor there until 2007. He was made Professor Emeritus in 2009. Read more…

A STAUNCH SECULARIST AND RATIONALIST

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

I first met Daya Varma in early 1976 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while I was a graduate student at MIT. We had been introduced by my friend Deepak Kapur, his devotee, who later became his son-in-law. Daya had been instrumental in founding the Indian Peoples Association of North America, IPANA, immediately after Indira Gandhi had declared the emergency and acquired draconian powers to quell dissent. Though quiet and laidback by disposition, Daya was a formidable organizer. Soon there were chapters across North America and Canada. Though a Pakistani, I was a kind of honorary member since there was so much that I shared with my Indian friends. Read more…

I FEEL DEEPLY PAINED AND SADDENED

Arshad Khan

 

I first met Daya, through our mutual friend Vinod, in Montreal around 1989-1990. Some of us were trying to organize a function in North America for the birth anniversary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz that used to be a hugely-attended annual event, known as Faiz Mela, in Lahore, until the Military Dictator Zia ul Haq banned it in the 80s. Some progressive friends, Faiz lovers all, had agreed to jointly host the function with progressive Indians in Montreal. Read more…

CONSIDERATION THE WAY PEOPLE THOUGHT

Herman Rosenfeld

 

I first met Daya over 40 years ago, in Montreal. He came much heralded, to the Afro-Asian, Latin-American Peoples’ Solidarity Committee, where I did most of my political learning and activist work at the time. Read more…

HE WAS SO COMMITTED TO THE DREAM OF A NEW SOCIETY

Alan Silverman

 

I first met Daya in the mid 1970’s in Montreal.  We met at some Third World support function. I was new to political activism and I had never met anyone like him. Read more…

DAYAJI WAS FOREVER HOLDING THE MOMENTUM

Swati Sharan

 

In 1999, our common friend Minoo Gundevia encouraged me to enter an essay contest on South Asian secularism and democracy for the International South Asian Forum or INSAF conference. As one of the chosen winners, I ended up in a life transforming experience. It was a place where many hearts were united for South Asian harmony and development and Dayaji was one of the organizers amongst them. Now, Dayaji, as we knew him, was a highly diverse individual. He was established as a researcher in Mcgill and later wrote two books on the history of medicine amongst many accomplishments. Read more…

DAYA DELIGHTED IN PUZZLES

Nitya Ramakrishnan

 

I have seldom met anyone quite as delightful as Daya. I doubt too, whether there is anyone so genuinely interested in things beyond oneself, as he. Read more…

COMPASSION GOD SHIELD

Maya Khankhoje

 

Daya Ram Varma: Compassion God Shield. Born with a name like that it is no wonder that Daya turned out to be the man he was, a man of infinite compassion who devoted a large chunk of his life to shielding the weak from the onslaughts of greedy corporations. He never let the world forget Union Carbide and its responsibility for the damage it caused to present and future generations. But he did not invoke God’s help for this task because the word God did not form part of his vocabulary. Daya’s vocabulary was that of science and rationality tempered by a radical humanism that brooked no compromise with the truth. Read more…

HE HAS LEFT US AN ENDURING MEMORY OF A PERSON WITH A HEART OF GOLD

Shireen Pasha (Anwar, Zaibun, Mariam and Qais Pasha)

 

How fortunate and blessed my family and I have been to have met and known Daya.  He had a remarkable insight, a quiet understanding, and generosity to give more than what he had already bestowed in terms of kindness, comfort and love…. and could intuitively sense people and what they were about. His generosity and kindness was bestowed on all the people lucky enough to cross his path. Read more…

PYARE (LOVING) DAYA

Zaibun and Mariam Pasha

 

You found us one winter day in the labyrinthine corridors of Royal Victoria, sitting at the edge of our seats, with fingers crossed, waiting to find out if our father would recover. We were looking for an apartment for ourselves but were finding it hard given the season, our limited resources and time. You heard of us through a common friend of my father’s, Vinod Mubayi, and wasted no time in finding us. Amidst all that uncertainty you offered us your home and your support and we accepted. Read more…

I KNEW THAT SEEKING ANSWERS TO SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS WOULD BE MY LIFE CAREER

Richard Gillis

 

I first knew Daya as a student at McGill during the 1960s.  He was a role model for me then and will remain so forever.  Read more…

DAYA WE WILL MISS YOU DEARLY

Sylvain Chemtob

 

I first met Dr Varma in 1985 when my PhD supervisor at the time (Jack Aranda) felt that I would benefit from a solid co-supervison through Daya’s involvement. Indeed I did, and very quickly I began to spend more time in his lab. Daya taught me how to write scientific reports (grants and papers). In this context I experienced a humbling event for my first paper as a PhD student. After having submitted my paper unsuccessfully to various journals, despite its approval by my main supervisor (Aranda), I finally decided to get a second opinion by consulting Daya. Daya gladly accepted and told me he would get back to me soon. Indeed, one week later, Daya asked to see me; upon meeting me, he said: “I hope you will not be offended, but the only text I left untouched is your name” – the paper was submitted and immediately accepted with minor revisions. Since, Daya and I co-authored 95 peer-reviewed papers. Read more…

RILLIANT SCIENTIST, INCREDIBLE HUMANITARIAN

Moshmi Bhattacharya

 

I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Varma in 1995 when I first came to Montreal. I came to know about his laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology, McGill University having attended a course taught by his wife, Dr. Shree Mulay. Read more…

ALWAYS READY TO HELP

Jacob Aranda

 

Please accept my most profound condolence and sympathy for the loss of one of the most wonderful persons I know. Read more…

WARM AND CARING PERSON

Romir Chatterjee

 

Daya’s life will always be a testament to the unending quest for social justice.  His approach gave real meaning to the term ‘scientific socialism’: an approach to building a new world based on a verifiable understanding of events, as distinct from dogma.  He applied this approach to all that he did, and to his own role as a committed communist. Read more…

“YOU JUST DO IT.”

Dolores Chew

 

It’s hard to write this, because it means accepting the fact that Daya is no longer around.  Though for the last many years Daya no longer lived in Montreal, he was a constant presence for me.  Through email enquiries about INSAF Bulletin, or CERAS, suggestions about CERAS statements — he was there.  While Daya was an intensely political person, and many of us remember him as such, for me, the personal is very closely intertwined with the political. Read more…

TRULY FELT THAT I HAD KNOWN HIM ALL MY LIFE

Raza Mir

 

Gaye dinon ka suraagh lekar kidhar se aaya, kidhar gaya vo

Ajeeb maanoos ajnabi thha, mujhe to hairaan kar gaya vo Read more…

WHAT I LEARNED MOST FROM MY MENTOR WAS NOT HIS POLITICS BUT HIS VALUESS

Stephen Orlov

It has taken me some time to find words that adequately express my sense of loss over the passing of such a dear friend and mentor, Daya Varma.  Read more…

DAYA WAS ENGAGED NOT JUST IN POLITICS IN THE ABSTRACT

Sekhar Ramakrishnan

I knew Daya for nearly 40 years. Roped into IPANA by Nagu and Vinod in mid-1976, there was a lot of interaction, travel back and forth, phone calls, then emails (perhaps not) during IPANA days. Much less in the last 30 years, but we remained in touch. I felt very close to him, not just because he influenced my political thinking back in 1976 but much more because it seemed our views evolved very similarly. I like to think that we came to similar conclusions on many topics (relevance of semi-feudal/semi-colonial characterization, importance of communalism to us versus to the voting public, Obama as an exceptional public figure) because we were both objective and non dogmatic. But perhaps it was because of the ways to think about society and politics that I, like many others, learned from him. Or perhaps it was partly illusory, from his ability to stress what we had in common and work slowly to change me (or be changed) through friendly exchange, building on the shared analysis.  Read more…

DAYA-HAPPY, VALUABLE AND IRREPLACEABLE

Felicitas Santiago

 

I read the numerous pouring of condolence and reminiscence of the ways Daya had affected and impressed people whose lives he had affected…  The Indian diaspora has lost a bright light in the political, intellectual, social and extended-familial atmosphere in these parts of our present world. Read more…

HE WAS SUCH A CONVIVIAL AND COMMITTED PERSON

Anil Srivastava

 

I often talk in my head with Daya, ever since I met him in Montreal, and his book and another book he gave me on history of medicine, are on my desk my constant companion to help me get a leg up in an area I know so little about. I was taken aback to hear about his passing away and that I will not get to talk to him. Read more…

HIS PASSING AWAY IS A GREAT LOSS FOR ALL OF YOU

Navsharan Singh

 

His passing away is a great loss for all of you – his family but he had an extended family and I consider myself a part of it.  I feel very privileged to have received his affection and spent many, many rich moments with him in Canada and in Delhi.  Read more…

DAYA WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL MAN

Birendra Prasada

 

Daya was an exceptional man. Not withstanding his very substantial academic achievements, his contributions to the cause of social justice and seeding and mentoring of several organizations and institutions will have left a lasting impression. Even though he left Montreal many years ago, his vision flourishes in Teesri Duniya, Kabir Centre and several other organizations.  Read more…

DAYA TOUCHED SO MANY LIVES IN SO MANY WAYS

Rita Manchanda

 

I came to know Daya much later after Tapan had worked a mystique around him of the Bhopal days of someone with rare commitment a soul mate of sorts in politics, in idealism, in living life to the full ….. For him he was the repository of the last resort of all knowledge – medical, scientific and Tapan would constantly refer to him and .the wonderful days spent together. He was Tapan’s elder brother.  Read more…

YOUR LOSS IS IMMEASURABLE

Kiran Omar

 

We were all so very sad to hear of dear Daya’s passing. May he rest in eternal peace and Grace.  Arif and I have lovely memories of him visiting Norko whenever he was in town, even on visits from NFLD he would stop by, have a cup of tea with us then then proceed toy our house. Always smiling gently and brushing off questions about his health. Read more…

“GUFTUGU BAND NA HO”

Iqbal Niazi

 

I opened my Yahoo account this evening to read the April issue of Insaf and was shocked and numbed to know that Daya Ram had passed away more than 20 days ago. I do not find words to express the sorrow for the loss of a friend of more than 60 years – a friend like Daya.- one of  those very  few to whom I could  share my deepest feelings freely. Read more…

DAYA DID INFLUENCE ME MUCH MORE THAN HE PROBABLY EVER KNEW

Stephan Corriveau

 

It is with a great deal of emotion that Carole and I have learned this morning the passing of Daya. Read more…

PROF VARMA’S LIFE WAS EXTRAORDINARY

Vidya Bhushan Rawat

 

I write…in great shock when I received the news of sad demise of Prof Daya Varma. Though I had not met him yet, as a person working with people on secularism and social justice, I knew him. Of course, I have also been writing on these issues for the past 16 years. Read more…

OTHER TRIBUTES

Read more…

SELECT INTERVIEW OF DAYA

The following interview was conducted by Rana Bose in 2004 for the publication Montreal Serai:

 

(Dr. Daya Varma, Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine at Montreal’s McGill University, was recently interviewed by Serai’s editors. Dr. Varma, who hails originally from India, has been a stalwart for several decades in Montreal as an anti-war militant, from the time of the Vietnam War and an inspiring activist and supporter for progressive movements worldwide in the post-colonial period. Dr. Varma has always looked beyond the pedestrian thought processes in radical frameworks and his responses to Serai’s questions only reinforce that. Ed.) Read more…

Medicine, Healthcare and the Raj: The Unacknowledged Legacy

New book by Daya Varma

The book is a significant intervention in the debates and existing scholarship on colonialism and medicine. Equally critical of the postmodern perspectives and of those who claim modern medicine as ‘gift’ from the western world, virtually identifying modern medicine with ‘western’ medicine, Daya Varma sifts the irrational from the rational critiques of imperialism. He makes a strong defense of modern medicine, preventive care, hygiene and public health as core of a viable strategy for accessible medicine. Read more…

AAP DERAILS THE MODIi-SHAH RATH

Editors

 

For the first time in almost a year, the victory of the AAP over the Modi-Shah cabal, whose pictures were defacing every billboard and bus stop in the nation’s capital in January 2015, has given some small measure of hope that the defeat of the nightmare known as Hindutva is actually possible.  The outcome of the Delhi election in terms of its wider national significance can be summed up by a line from the Urdu poet Faiz: “roshan kahin bahar ke imkan hue to hain” (the possibilities of the emergence of spring have brightened). Read more…

THE JUGGERNAUT HASN’T ONLY BEEN HALTED, IT HAS CRASHED

Praful Bidwai

 

There isn’t just one big story in the Delhi election; there are two. The first is the staggering victory of the Aam Aadmi Party, which polled 54.3 percent of the vote, even higher than the Janata Party’s 52.6 percent in the landmark post-Emergency “wave” of 1977. No party outside Sikkim has ever matched AAP’s Delhi seat-score of 95.7 percent. Read more…

INDIA DEMOCRACY AT THE CROSSROADS UNDER CURRENT POLITICAL DISPENSATION

Ram Puniyani

 

I begin this lecture paying tribute to my very dear friend, Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, with whom I had the rare privilege of working with for close to two decades. Dr. Engineer was a unique scholar-activist, totally committed to the dream and vision of a humane society that honours the values of diversity and where human rights for all are the defining point. Read more…

NUCLEAR ENERGY DEBATE – MUCH HYPED MODI-OBAMA BREAKTHROUGH A MISNOMER

Vinod Mubayi

 

Dedicated anti-nuclear activists oppose nuclear power everywhere so their critique of the Indian nuclear program is expected.  However, it is possible to have a somewhat different perspective on the Indian nuclear program as well as offer a critique of the hyped Obama-Modi “breakthrough” that is supposed to lead to a number of Westinghouse and GE designed reactors being constructed and operated in India in the near future. Read more…

INDIA

Daya Varma

 

I joined the Communist Party of India (CPI) a few years after the expulsion of P.C. Joshi; Joshi was readmitted but never thereafter in influential position. The Telangana peasant struggle had come to an end. The January 27, 1950 article titled  “Mighty advance of the national liberation movement in the colonial and dependent countries” in the official journal of the Comintern “For a Lasting Peace and People’s Democracy”, was  under debate; although this article pointed to the anti-imperialist role of the Indian ruling class led by Nehru, there was sufficient ambiguity, which sharpened the  debate in favor of the official line  adopted in the 1948  Calcutta Congress; the essence of this line was  “Telangana’s path is our path” and “Yeh azadi jhooti hai (this independence is fake)”. Read more…

TRIBUTE: GOODBYE COMRADE! ALVIDA MEHDI CHACHA!

Noor Zaheer

 

What can one write about an uncle who pampered one with hot chocolate and insisted on presenting a book on Marxism with it? What can one say about him who gets you the first proper job, the one that you love doing, and performs a detailed autopsy of all that you write, one who does not fear giving away his contacts and is convinced that Marsiakhwani is a one-man theatre, whose eyes glistened with knowledge through thick spectacles and a warm smile played on his lips as he conjured up a new jibe at politicians, society, religion and even himself? One who wrote to think, thought to analyse and analysed to remain a comrade. Read more…

THE LAST OF HIS GENERATION: S.M. MEHDI

Bilal Hashmi

 

Radical Urdu playwright S.M. Mehdi, who has passed away aged 92, was the last of his generation—urbane man of letters, public intellectual, skillful raconteur, unrepentant Marxist. A veteran of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, he was among the guiding lights of experimental and purposive theatre in the country. Read more…

HRDA-INDIA: STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF TEESTA SETALVAD AND JAVED ANAND

Henri Tiphagne

Honorary National Working Secretary

Human Rights Defenders Alert – India

 

The Human Rights Defenders Alerts – India [HRDA], is shocked to hear about the denial of anticipatory bail to renowned human rights activists Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand by the Gujarat High Court on February 12, 2015. Read more…

SOLIDARITY WITH TEESTA SETALVAD – Demonstration in Mumbai

A large number of activists gathered outside Dadar Railway Station in Mumbai on Sunday (15-2-2015) evening for a public demonstration of solidarity with Teesta Setalvad & Javed Anand who are being hounded by Gujarat police with false cases. Famous film maker Anand Patwardhan, renowned writer-activist Dr. Ram Puniyani, AIDWA Maharashtra Secretary  Sonya Gill, CITU leader Dr.Vivek Monteiro, Dolphy D’souza, Subodh More, Vandana Shah, Sumedh Jadhav and several eminent citizens of Mumbai participated in the meeting organized by Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) Maharashtra committee.  DYFI state president conducted Adv.Bhagavan Bhagwan Bhojne, Secretary Preethy Sekhar and State committee member Moin Ansar also spoke. Read more…

WHY I STAND BY HER: SUPPORT FOR TEESTA IS SUPPORT FOR ACCESS TO JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF A POGROM

Indira Jaising

 

Victims of crime are known to get so tired of legal processes that they drop out from fatigue. Often, they are bought over by the accused. This is likelier when the accused is a powerful person, with the ability to mobilise finances and wield political clout. Read more…

DR. AMARTYA SEN’S LETTER TO BOARD MEMBERS OF NALANDA UNIVERSITY

(Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recently resigned from the governing board of Nalanda University – Eds.) Read more…

AMIT SHAH CASE – COMPLETE MOCKERY OF JUSTICE SYSTEM

Mainstream, VOL LIII No 9, February 21, 2015

 

Once again the Indian Investigating agencies and Judiciary have failed the people of India by letting out a powerful political leader despite having enough evidence of involvement in a henious crime. Amit Shah has been acquitted by the Special CBI Court, Bombay, in the Sohrabuddin murder case even before the trial for the case could start. Read more…

GOVIND PANSARE AND WIFE SHOT

Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Govind Pansare (82), who was critically wounded by gunshots in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, was airlifted to Mumbai for advanced treatment. Unfortunately, Pansare who was shot in the lungs, did not survive. Read more…

SILENCING DISSENT

The Hindu, February 23, 2015

 

Maharashtra’s prominent educational, social and cultural institutions have been insidiously infiltrated by forces of the Right that brook no pluralistic dissent. Read more…

NO COMPROMISE ON DEMAND FOR REPEAL OF LAND ORDINANCE

Land Ordinance is Anti Farmer, Government Engaging in Propaganda

Land Ordinance to Impact Food Security Adversely Read more…

BANGLADESH: POLARIZATION, POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND UNDECLARED CIVIL WAR

ACHR Press Release February 18, 2015

 

NEW DELHI: Asian Centre for Human Rights in its report, “Bangladesh: Polarisation, Political Violence & an Undeclared Civil War” (http://www.achrweb.org/reports/bangla/Bangladesh2015-01.pdf), released today stated that about 90 people have been killed and more than a thousand were injured in the ongoing violent anti-government protests by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led 20-party alliance demanding resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League Government and holding of mid-term elections under a neutral caretaker government since 5 January 2015. Read more…

WRITER AVIJIT ROY HACKED TO DEATH

Dhaka Tribune 26 February 2015

 

His wife blogger Bonna also sustains severe injuries in the attack

 

Blogger and writer Avijit Roy has been killed and his wife, blogger Rafida Ahmed Bonna, severely injured when unidentified miscreants hacked them at TSC of Dhaka University on Thursday night. Read more…

SYRIZA: THE GREEK SPRING

Costas Douzinas

 

The 2015 Greek elections mark the beginning of the end of a cycle that started in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are now witnessing the end of the “end of history” metanarrative. Read more…

Dedicated to Syed Mohammad Mehdi, a first generation  Communist and a founding member of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA)

RSS FLEXES ITS MUSCLES AS INDIA LURCHES BACKWARD

Editors

 

About twenty years ago, at a meeting in Montreal, the late Eqbal Ahmad (1933-1999) described the political situation in South Asia as the Pakistanization of India and Indianization of Pakistan. We are not sure if both predictions of this eminent political scientist have proven to be correct but most certainly India is no more what Jawaharlal Nehru has envisaged in his “Tryst with Destiny” speech on the midnight of August 14; it is becoming closer to what was theorized by Eqbal Ahmad. Read more…

AN OPEN LETTER TO WORLD LEADERS

Malala Yousafzai and Friends

 

There are moments in history that become turning points. In our view, 2015 will be such a moment. It is the most important year for global decision-making since the start of the new millennium.

 

We believe it’s just possible that we could end 2015 with a new global compact — an agreed pathway to a better, safer future for people and planet that will inspire all the citizens of the world. We can choose the path of sustainable development. Or we might not — and regret it for generations to come. Which side of history will you be on? Read more…

WHY THE PDP SHOULD NOT ALLY WITH THE BJP IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR

Praful Bidwai

 

It has been called Jammu and Kashmir’s “Black Swan” moment, a “historic” opportunity to heal divisions in the deeply polarised state, and a test of sagacity and even statesmanship for Narendra Modi and the People’s Democratic Party’s Mufti Muhammad Sayeed. Read more…

WHAT’S IN STORE FOR KASHMIRIS IF BJP IS PART OF THE GOVERNMENT?

Ram Puniyani

 

The recent (December 2015) verdict of Kashmir elections has been fractured, so to say. While PDP has emerged as the largest single party, the BJP is a close second with substantial percentage of votes. Interestingly BJP has secured most seats and major vote share from the Hindu majority Jammu region of Kashmir. Now the dilemma for the other parties, National Conference, Congress is in which direction to go as for Government formation is concerned. Read more…

PAKISTAN: NOT BY ANGER ALONE

I A Rehman

 

 

Pakistan is on trial. It is being tested for its capacity to overcome the threat from religious extremists/terrorists without losing sight of justice and its ideal of peace in the land.

 

The Peshawar carnage has awakened the government and political parties to their foremost duty — protecting the life and liberty of citizens. This may not be the time to question them for their failure to see the terrorists’ threat earlier. At the moment, the people must concentrate on ensuring that the response to the terrorists is sound, just and effective. A national consensus on denying any quarter to terrorists is welcome but what matters more is the kind of action plan this unity produces. Sadly enough, the signs so far are not wholly reassuring. Read more…

CHARLIE HEBDO MASSACRE, FALSE STANDARD BEARERS OF “FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION” AND ISLAMOPHOBIA

Javed Anand

 

“To those fuelling Islamophobia, here’s a tweet from Dyab Abou Jahjah from Belgium: ‘I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and I died defending his right to do so.'”

 

To the mourning parents, siblings, children, spouses, lovers, family and friends of those who were gunned down in the horrific massacre in Paris, what can I say? Except that I am with you in your grief even as I cannot even pretend to imagine the depth of your pain and suffering. And that I am sorry and deeply ashamed that your near and dear ones were done to death in the name of a god and a prophet that I am supposed to have in common with the mass murderers. Read more…

GANDHI, WORKERS AND AFFLUENT SECTIONS

V.K. Tripathi

 

Gandhi, the person who stood firmly against oppression and fanaticism, is still alive in the hearts of millions of poor masses. However, large sections of Indian affluent classes have developed so much hate for him that they are lavishing praise on his assassin. They view the leader of the organization which spread this venom as the fortune maker of India. Read more…

WHY NARENDRA MODI STOLE CHRISTMAS?

Countercurrents.org, January 14, 2015

 

On 2 December 2014 , Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that in future 25 December would be celebrated as Good Governance Day because it was the birthday of Hindu nationalists Madan Mohan Malaviya and Atal Behari Vajpayee (1). Subsequently a circular was sent out to schools ordering them to cancel the public holiday on the 25 th and require children to come to school on Christmas Day for a variety of activities. Read more…

WHEN ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT INSTITUTIONAL

Arun Kumar

 

Higher education in India suffers from a lack of a democratic leadership that understands its true nature. For those heading academic institutions, accountability is personal and not institutional or societal. The erosion of autonomy and accountability in centres of education is the biggest challenge an aspirational and rising India faces.

 

The Director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, has resigned because he was sought to be marginalised by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD). The faculty and alumni of IIT have come out in his support but the issue festers. Unfortunately, this has little to do with the real problem facing IITs — a lack of adequate faculty and little cutting-edge research. Read more…

FILM CENSOR BOARD STACKED WITH BJP FAVORITES

(The News Minute| January 19, 2015)

 

The Central Government on Monday appointed a new chairperson for the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). While producer Pahlaj Nihalani was appointed as the censor board chief, nine other members were appointed with immediate effect following the change of guard at the CFBC led by Leela Samson.  (Leela Samson was the chair of CFBC who resigned in protest along with 12 other members two weeks ago, citing the BJP government’s interference in the workings of the CFBC. – Eds.) Read more…

SHADES OF TERROR

Suhas Chakma

 

It has been about a month since India witnessed the largest terror killings in 2014 in which a total of 81 innocent Adivasis were massacred in Kokrajhar and Sonitpur districts of Assam on December 23, 2013, by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) headed by Songbijit Ingti Kathar. It took place just one week after another equally heart-wrenching massacre of 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren by the Tehrik-i-Taliban (Pakistan) terrorists who attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16. Read more…

DELHI HIGH COURT REJECTS HOME MINISTRY’S ACTION AGAINST GREENPEACE

Bhagwan Kesbhat

 

The Delhi High Court noticed that the action of* Home Ministry* to block Greenpeace’s foreign funds is arbitrary, illegal & unconstitutional. Court also observed that NGOs are entitled to have their viewpoint and merely because their views are not in consonance with the Government’s views it does not mean the NGO is acting to the detriment of the national interest. Read more…

SRI LANKA’S LONGTIME PRESIDENT OUSTED IN ELECTION DEFEAT

Scott Neuman

 

Sri Lanka’s incoming President Maithripala Sirisena waves to supporters as he leaves the election secretariat in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Friday. Sirisena defeated long-time President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Read more…

AMIT SHAH AND CLOSED ENCOUNTERS OF THE WORST KIND

Siddharth Varadarajan

 

The most astonishing aspect of the CBI court’s decision to release Amit Shah from all charges connected to the 2005-06 murders of Sohrabuddin, his wife Kauser Bi and Tulsiram Prajapati is not that the judge chose to see the BJP president’s prosecution as politically motivated. Rather, it is that the Central Bureau of Investigation doesn’t seem particularly worried about the judgment’s implications for its own reputation and for the very future of the fake encounter case. Read more…

SCIENCE MEET DIDN’T HEAR: 40 YEARS AGO, IISC DEBUNKED FLYING CLAIMS

T.A. Johnson

 

At the Indian Science Congress on Sunday, at a special session called “Vedic Science through Sanskrit”, a former pilot, Captain Anand J Bodas, claimed that aircraft technology existed in India thousands of years before the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. To substantiate his claim that aeronautical engineering in India dates back to Vedic times, Bodas referred to a book, Vyamanika Shastra, that claims to document ancient sage Maharishi Bharadwaja’s musings on aviation technology. Read more…

PSEUDO-SCIENCE MUST NOT FIGURE IN INDIAN SCIENCE CONGRESS

Vikrant Dadawala

 

A scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California has launched an online petition demanding that a lecture on ‘Ancient Indian Aviation Technology’ to be delivered at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai in January be cancelled as it brings into question the “integrity of the scientific process”. Read more…

RESURGENCE OF GODSE WORSHIP

Ram Puniyani

 

Times are a changing; and changing fast. During last many decades most Hindu nationalists have kept the appreciation of their hero, Nathuram Godse under wraps. The programs appreciating his politics did use to make small news here and there some time; but as such it was a muted act not much publicized and generally kept as a low key affair. During last few years Pradeep Dalvi’s play in Marathi, Mee Nathuram Boltoy (I, Nathuram speaking), attacking Gandhi and upholding Godse, drew packed houses in various places in Maharashtra. Many people had also protested against staging of this play off and on. Read more…

OBITUARY: SYED MOHAMMAD MEHDI (1922-2015)

Notes From Maamujan’s Diary

Jawed Naqvi

 

There can be many ways to announce the end of an era. Saeed Mirza made Naseem, for example, a delicately poignant film that turned the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya into a metaphor for the unravelling of the Nehruvian promise. Saeed staged a cinematic coup of sorts, in fact, by getting the leftist poet Kaifi Azmi to agree to essay the waning of the Indian dream. He excelled in his role as the doting grandfather of Naseem, a curious, fun-loving Muslim schoolgirl, like so many of her age from the pre-1990s Mumbai. Read more…

TARAN ON HER GRANDFATHER, S.M. MEHDI

So Baba, my grandfather, decided he could not do without his beloved wife (Zahra Begum-1927-2014). Just ten weeks after Nanna, he passed away at home, in his sleep. He was 94, which irrationally does not stop me from wishing I’d had more time with him. Read more…

BABA: MOHD MEHDI

What can I say about you?

A father figure to me Read more…

MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR MEHDI SAHAB at Ghalib Academy, New Delhi

Vinod Mubayi

 

The memorial service on January 14, 2015 was both a poignant and a deeply moving evening. Read more…

OBITUARY: RAJNI KOTHARI (1928-2015)

Shiv Visvanathan

How does one talk of a man who defined a subject, determined its directions, was its dominating presence without a shade of pomposity or status. Rajni Kothari was clear about some of the subjects of his studies, irreverently and pragmatically certain that the Indian elite was knowledge-proof, that the only changes it would accept were pressures from below or by mimicking its colonial masters. Here was a man far ahead of his times, a futurist in perspective. Read more…

OBITUARY: TAPAN RAYCHAUDHURI (1926–2014)

A B

 

Narendra Krishna Sinha, the legendary historian of yester years and the author of the celebrated Economic History of Bengal, introduced a number of brilliant students to historical research. Tapan Raychaudhuri, who died in Oxford on 27 November at the age of eighty-eight, belonged to that galaxy of historians. After a brief period of teaching at the University of Calcutta, he went to Oxford. While in Europe, he studied the original records of Dutch trade in India and produced the book, Jan Company in Coromandal, which shot him into fame. Coming back to India, he taught for some time as the Professor of Economic History at Delhi School of Economics. Then he again went to Oxford and took up a teaching post there. Gradually he rose to become a professor at this world famous institution. He also edited, along with Irfan Habib, the first volume of the Cambridge Economic History of India. His other works on history are Europe Reconsidered and Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities. Read more…

OBITUARY: PERIN CHANDRA (1919-2015)

Chandita Mukherjee

 

Perin Chandra passed away peacefully on 7th January, 2015 after 96 years of an active and eventful life as a communist and peace activist, loved and admired by all. Read more…

INSAANIYAT DUR AST (Humanity far off)

Vinod Mubayi

 

[The famous Farsi saying Dilli dur ast or Hanooz Dilli dur ast (Delhi is far off) often ascribed to the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin represented that the voyager or seeker had still far to go before he could reach his goal].

 

When the news of the horrifying massacre of small children at a school in Peshawar surfaced those contemplating Pakistan may be forgiven if they thought of it as a place where “insaaniyat dur ast” (humanity is far off) is the norm. There was an especially macabre quality to this gruesome incident where children were forced to recite the shahada before being shot by the brainwashed robotic salafis of the Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP). Read more…

IT WASN’T THE FINAL ATROCITY

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

The gut-wrenching massacre in Peshawar’s Army Public School has left Pakistan aghast and sickened. All political leaders have called for unity against terrorism. But this is no watershed event that can bridge the deep divides within. In another few days this episode of 134 dead children will become one like any other. Read more…

AFTER PESHAWAR: SEIZE THE PEACE OPPORTUNITY

Praful Bidwai

 

When Narendra Modi called Nawaz Sharif on December 16 to say that the Peshawar carnage “was not only an attack against Pakistan but an assault against all of humanity”, he raised the hope that he would empathetically engage Pakistan during its hour of crisis. That hope was soon weakened by the kneejerk official response to the granting of bail to Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The bail was granted by a court. The Pakistan government has decided to appeal against it and detained Lakhvi. In India too, dozens of people charged with or convicted of serious offences have been granted bail, including Maya Kodnani, Amit Shah, LN Mishra’s killers, and so on. Read more…

IMPOSSIBLE LESSONS

Ravi Sinha

 

Far away from Peshawar five men and a woman sat in a physician’s waiting room in Lucknow. The television screen that ordinarily shows some Bollywood film or a cricket match had a news channel on. It was day after the slaughter of children. The assistant who maintains the waiting list of patients and collects the doctor’s fee said something very predictable, even if heart-felt, expressing his horror and revulsion. The matter would have passed as unremarkably as most things do most of the times, except for what an elderly gentleman waiting to see the doctor had to say in response. Read more…

PARIVAR’S RE-CONVERSION OFFENSIVE: NASTY THREAT TO CITIZENSHIP

Praful Bidwai

 

The Sangh Parivar has made a habit out of raking up divisive issues which most people thought were settled at the time of Indian Independence or shortly thereafter. For instance, India adopted Parliamentary democracy in preference to the presidential system after much debate. But the unitarian, pro-centralisation Bharatiya Janata Party has always been partial to the presidential form despite its unsuitability for a huge and diverse country like India. Read more…

MY VISIT TO KABAADI BASTI AGRA: THE FAÇADE OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSION

V.K. Tripathi

 

On December 20, 2014, I visited the Kabadi Basti, behind Vednagar colony, Agra where 60 Bengali speaking Muslim rag pickers were reported to have converted to Hinduism 12 days earlier. The TV channels and newspapers gave it an extensive coverage. There was debate in Parliament too. I wanted to see the truth of the ordeal these poor countrymen went through. Read more…

UNTOUCHABILITY THRIVES IN INDIA: FIGHTING THE CASTE MENACE

Praful Bidwai

 

It’s fashionable in some circles to claim that discrimination based on caste has steadily decreased in India, as it’s bound to, thanks to modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation. The character of caste is itself changing from a system of social hierarchy based on birth and ritual purity, to a political phenomenon.  As India evolves into a “merit-based” society, the argument goes, there can be no place for untouchability vis-à-vis Dalits (Scheduled Castes) in it.

 

This argument is bogus. India has failed to industrialise significantly. And the modernisation process is slow, uneven and combines many pre-modern elements of culture and society, including caste, and sometimes reinforces caste-based deprivation and discrimination. We know this from daily experience and official reports. Hierarchy-obsessed India is nowhere near becoming “merit-based”. Read more…

HOW IS GHAR VAPASI DIFFERENT FROM FORCIBLE CONVERSIONS?

Ram Puniyani

 

Propaganda around conversions has been one of the major political tools during last few decades. It was Niyogi Commission report which investigated the conversions in Adivasi areas in 1950s, then the Meenaxipuram conversions of Dalits into Islam, the and then the gruesome murder of Pastor Graham Stewart Stains on the charges that he was doing the conversion; are few amongst the big spectrum related to the phenomenon of conversions. As such the regular propaganda by communal forces that Muslim Kings converted people into Islam by sword has been made the part of ‘social common sense’ by now. On regular basis around Christmas time one saw the anti Christian violence in Adivasi areas a decade ago, and in that context rather than focusing on the violence against religious minorities, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called for a National debate on Conversions. Read more…

HRCP SLAMS KILLING OF CHILDREN IN TALIBAN ATTACK

December 16, 2014

 

Lahore, December 16: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has called the killing of more than 120 children in a Taliban attack on an army-run school in Peshawar a national tragedy which it said must open the eyes of anyone still harbouring any doubts that Taliban and Pakistan could coexist. Read more…

TALIBAN SCHOOL ATTACK HIGHLIGHTS VULNERABILITY OF CIVILIANS

Amnesty International

 

The vast majority of those killed in the attack were school children.

 

“Of prime importance now is that the Pakistani authorities take effective steps to protect civilians and minimize the risk of this type of sickening tragedy being repeated.” Amnesty International’s David Griffiths Read more…

PAKISTAN’S SICKENING MASSACRE ISN’T ABOUT RELIGION – IT’S ABOUT INTIMIDATION

Bina Shah

 

To survive as a country Pakistan needs to map out a road to peace, with the army, politicians and the people rallying under a unifying cause Read more…

A SPECIAL KIND OF EVIL

The Indian Express – December 17, 2014

 

It defies comprehension, the special kind of evil that fired the minds of the men who brought death to Peshawar on Monday, an evil that made them target children gathering for their morning classes and extinguish so many young lives. In days to come, all of Pakistan will mourn. Indians will share their sorrow, as parents, as siblings, and as people who have learned that the living carry with them wounds inflicted by terror. Read more…

CRIME OF NEGLIGENT SURGERIES: “KILLING WOMEN TO CURB POPULATION”

J Amalorparvanathan

 

India is yet to treat women, especially those who are poor, with care and compassion.

 

The several guidelines in the National Population Policy and even Supreme Court directives are only meant to be flouted with unfailing regularity.The result is Chhattisgarh; not one but many Chhattisgarhs – year afteryear. After every tragedy, some doctors will be suspended and nothing more will happen, and in due course of time we will even forget Chhattisgarh completely. Read more…

RIGHT TO WATER

Sitaram Shelar

 

In a historic judgment by the Mumbai High Court, the Right to water has been equated with the Right to life, enshrined in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. Read more…

FROM SIKKIM-ISATION TO MODI-FICATION

Anand Swaroop Verma

 

India’s neighbours are often skeptical about it. The merger of Sikkim in India way back in 1975 introduced a new term in political vocabulary of this subcontinent- ‘Sikkim-isation’. Read more…

PEOPLE’S SAARC DECLARATION

“PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS UNITING SOUTH ASIA FOR DEEPENING DEMOCRACY, SOCIAL JUSTICE & PEACE”

 

We, the participants of People’s SAARC Convergence met in Kathmandu on 22-24 November 2014 to reaffirm our solemn commitments to justice, peace, security, human rights, and democracy in the region for equality for all and to eliminate all forms of discrimination. Read more…

AMU (Aligarh Muslim University), RAJA MAHENDRA PRATAP AND ATTEMPTS OF POLARIZATION

Ram Puniyani

 

Those resorting to communal politics have not only perfected their techniques of polarizing the communities along religious lines, but have been constantly resorting to new methods for dividing the society. On the backdrop of Muzzafar nagar, where ‘Love Jihad’ propaganda was used to enhance the divisive agenda, now in Aligarh an icon of matchless virtues, Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh is being employed for the similar purposes. Read more…

POETICS OF A NATION: REMEMBERING NEHRU

Shiv Visvanathan

 

Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be seen merely as an object of history, a fragment of policy. He was a dream, a hope, a claim to innocence, an aesthetic, which gave to modernity a touch of elegance. Read more…

A SUMMARY OF U.S.-CUBA RELATIONS SINCE FIDEL CASTRO SEIZED POWER IN A 1959 REVOLUTION

The United States and Cuba plan to restore diplomatic relations and end more than five decades of fierce animosity that at one point took the world to the edge of nuclear conflict.

 

Here is a summary of U.S.-Cuba relations since Fidel Castro seized power in a 1959 revolution Read more…

LEFT PARTIES UNITE TO OPPOSE CORPORATE-HINDUTVA FORCES

(Press release; November 1,  2014)

 

A meeting of six left parties – Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India, Revolutionary Socialist Party, All India Forward Bloc, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation and Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) was held today at New Delhi. They have issued the following statement: Read more…

THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF BHOPAL DISASTER

Editors

 

On the fateful night of December 2-3, 1984, nearly forty metric tons of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas spewed from the Union Carbide Pesticide Plant at Bhopal. By the morning of December 3, Bhopal was a City of Death. Read more…

HOW THE SANGH PARIVAR SYSTEMATICALLY ATTACKS THE VERY IDEA OF INDIA

Anand Patwardhan

 

The Editors’ Guild has honoured me by asking me to deliver the Rajendra Mathur Memorial lecture this year. But as you know, I am a filmmaker rather than a speaker, and would like to intersperse my talk with a few clips from my films. Read more…

WHY THE RIGHT TO DISSENT IS INDISPENSABLE: Romila Thapar Speaks Out

Praful Bidwai

 

When Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani famously said of the media during the  Emergency that “when asked to bend, they crawled”, he received widespread praise from the intelligentsia and even from people opposed to the BJP’s ideology—because he spoke the truth about the loss of independence and professional integrity on the part of the Fourth Estate and other institutions. Read more…

TARGETING NEHRUVIAN LEGACY

Ram Puniyani

 

The debates about India’s partition, Gandhi murder and policies of Nehru have been a matter of ceaseless debates. Each political tendency has their own interpretation of these events, which in a way are landmarks of sorts in modern Indian History. As such the phenomenon of Partition of India and assassination of Gandhi are interwoven in the sense that Godse held Gandhi responsible for appeasement of Muslims. Godse constructed his story around warped understandings of the events of the time to create the ground for murder of the Mahatma. These views are shared by many Hindu nationalists, who are in and around RSS-BJP. Read more…

POLITICAL MOBILISATION OF MUSLIMS IN INDIA – CHANGING PATTERN

Irfan Engineer

 

Muslim votes in post partition India have traditionally been mobilised by the politicians on three tropes – security, religio-cultural identities and fair share of Muslims. The recent victory of two All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) MLAs in Maharashtra Assembly elections held in October 2014 shows that Muslim votes could be mobilized on a fourth trope in the times when Hindu Nationalists are aggressively asserting themselves – that of counter assertion aiming at communal unity to take on the Hindu Nationalists. These tropes have been pursued through three different strategies – 1) withdrawal from electoral politics, 2) joining political parties not dominated by Muslims and 3) forming Muslim dominated parties. Read more…

HAVE INDIAN INTELLECTUALS BEEN CO-OPTED?

Jawed Naqvi

 

Increasingly of late, Prof Romila Thapar is required to assume the nearly impossible role of Emperor Akbar, who, according to the official plaque at his tomb near Agra, had “created a nation out of a mob”. To her credit (and sorrow), the ageless historian stands firm among a handful of public intellectuals left in India who have refused to be pulverised by the rise of right-wing Hindutva mobs. Read more…

THE MODI DEVELOPMENT MODEL WILL DRIVE INDIA OVER THE CLIFF

Anand Patwardhan

 

In 2006 and 2008, Muslims in the Maharashtrian town of Malegaon were accused of bombing their own graveyard and mosque. After seven years of blaming Pakistan and arresting and torturing Muslim suspects, in May 2013 the National Investigation Agency, India’s leading anti-terror agency filed charges against four Hindu radicals, all former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers.(From The Times of India, January 8, 2011) Read more…

LEADING INDIAN JOURNALIST P. SANAITH SAYS INDIA FOLLOWS THE U.S. MODEL AT ITS PERIL

Sonali Kolhatkar

 

(A person with a mask of now-Prime Minister Narendra Modi tied to his head takes part in an April 2014 rally in Varanasi, India, in support of Modi’s candidacy. Photo by Shutterstock not reproduced)

 

Palagummi Sainath, or P. Sainath, as he prefers to be called, is India’s most decorated journalist. In addition to the World Media Summit award that he just won, he is the recipient of many prizes, including the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award for his work covering India’s poor and rural areas. What sets Sainath apart from most Indian journalists is that he has steadfastly covered the country’s most dispossessed communities and has refused to participate in a rapidly Westernized media landscape that puts profits over integrity. Read more…

DOCTORING HISTORY FOR POLITICAL GOALS: ORIGIN OF CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA

Ram Puniyani

 

Caste hierarchy is the major obstacle to the goal of social justice and it continues to be a major obstacle to social progress even today. There are many a theories, which have tried to understand its origin. The latest in the series is the attempt of RSS to show its genesis due to invasion of Muslim kings. Three books written by RSS ideologues argue that Islamic atrocities during medieval period resulted in emergence of untouchables and low castes.  The books are “Hindu Charmakar Jati”, “Hindu Khatik Jati” and “Hindu Valmiki Jati”. Read more…

BLAME POVERTY AND BIAS: 53% OF ALL PRISONERS IN INDIA ARE DALITS, MUSLIMS AND TRIBALS

The latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on Prison Statistics India for the year 2013 has thrown up a shocking statistic, reflective of how casteism and bias are still an integral part of the Indian psyche. Read more…

REPORT OF THE NATIONAL CONSULTATION ON WORKERS’ MOVEMENT AND COMMUNALISM

A national consultation on workers’ movement and communalism was organized by Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai on 18th October, 2014 in Mumbai. The primarily aim for organizing this consultation was to take stock of the communal politics that is so largely prevalent and its impact on the trade union movement. Read more…

STOP THE CAMP METHOD OF STERILIZATION

Mumbai (Noveber 4, 2014)

 

Stop the “camp method” of sterilisation, a coalition of pro-health networks and women’s groups have said, as more details emerge from Chhattisgarh where 11 women died, allegedly due to medical negligence. Read more…

VOICES FROM JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY: Students in Action

Koumi Dutta & Swastik Basu

 

On 10th September, the students of Jadavpur University (JU) began with their sit-in demonstration. On 20th September, the streets of Kolkata witnessed a rally like no other, a rally that brought together one lakh students from all over the state, who joined hands to raise their voices against the State aided atrocities and cadre hooliganism that has become rampant in the colleges of West Bengal. Read more…

MACHIL FAKE ENCOUNTER CASE

A Saga of Shameful Brutality Unveiled and Officially Confirmed

 

Machil fake encounter: 5 Armymen sentenced to life imprisonment

Rajat Pandit,TNN | Nov 14, 2014, 04.21 AM IST

 

New Delhi: The Army has sentenced two officers and three soldiers to life imprisonment for gunning down three unemployed Kashmiri youths and then trying to pass them off as “Pakistani militants” in a stage-managed encounter in Machil sector along the Line of Control in April 2010. Read more…

THE SOCIETY FOR SECULAR PAKISTAN

Press Release

 

The Society for Secular Pakistan (SfSP) strongly condemns the killings of Shazad Masih and his pregnant wife Shama by the crowd incited by the clerics of three mosques of the villages in Kasur. Read more…

WHY DOES MALALA YUSUFZAI’S NOBEL BOTHER SO MANY ON THE LEFT?

 

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

Western agendas and interests can sometimes be intelligently leveraged for furthering what is important for peoples everywhere.

 

Arundhati Roy’s charm and lucidity have iconized her in the world of left-wing politics.  But, asked by Laura Flanders what she made of the 2014 Nobel Prize, she appeared to be swallowing a live frog: “Well, look, it is a difficult thing to talk about because Malala is a brave girl and I think she has even recently started speaking out against the US invasions and bombings…but she’s only a kid you know and she cannot be faulted for what she did….the great game is going on…they pick out people [for the Nobel Prize].” For one who has championed peoples causes everywhere so wonderfully well these shallow, patronizing remarks were disappointing. Read more…

MODI MEETS OBAMA

Sukla Sen

 

The Indian media not too unexpectedly, drummed up a lot of hype around incumbent Indian Prime Minister Modi’s trip to the US (September 26-30). Read more…

DISCOVERING IRAN. WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

 

Marcel Proust said: “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”  During the past two decades, I visited Iran on numerous occasions staying 10-14 days at a time.  This time around, I stayed for 2 months and heeding Proust, I carried with me a fresh pair of eyes.    I discarded both my Western lenses as well as my Iranian lenses and observed with objective eyes.  It was a formidable journey that left me breathless. Read more…

AMIYA-DA – MASTAR MOSHAI – TOGORE

Rana Bose

 

My father Amiya Kumar Bose was born on the 25th of December, 1900. He would have been 114 years old this year. An eminent Cardiologist and scientist of India, he died on the 14th of November 1975, a few months after the onset of the Emergency. I had just re-started my Engineering degree in the US, after a lapse of five years. My sister, Raka, who was working as a Microbiologist in the US and I, rushed back when we heard that he had had a severe cerebral hemorrhage. The planes were all delayed and we were missing all the connections. At Heathrow, David Frost the well-known TV commentator (who had a show on Al Jazeera until recently, till he passed on) was being taken to the plane by car and he heard that the gates had been closed and we were going to miss our flight, and somehow he invited us to accompany him and we got on the flight. By the time we arrived in Calcutta, Amiya Bose was gone. So from the airport we went straight to our home and carried his body to the crematorium in Keoratala. Read more…

OBITUARY: SAM NOUMOFF (1935-2014)

James Putzel

 

For many generations of students who studied politics at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Sam Noumoff was an iconic figure. He taught courses in political theory and comparative politics that you would be hard pressed to find on the curricula of universities in the developed or, indeed the developing, world today. Aside from offering a radical perspective on the comparative politics of East Asia, over the years Sam introduced thousands of students to Marxist political theory and even offered a course, on which I was briefly his teaching assistant, called Comparative Revolution. Read more…

OBITUARY: BIPAN CHANDRA (1928-2014)

Mritiunjoy Mohanty

 

Prof Bipan Chandra, the pre-eminent historian of modern India and a leading public intellectual, passed away on Saturday, 30th August 2014. He had been ailing for a while. Read more…

OBITUARY: GEETA DAS (1936-2014)

(ML Update)

 

Veteran revolutionary women’s leader of the party Comrade Geeta Das breathed her last on 24 October at her daughter’s house in Santoshpur, West Bengal. Comrade Geeta Das, popularly known among her comrades as ‘Geetadi’ was 78 years old and was suffering from several age related ailments. Geetadi hailed from Kotalipara in Faridpore district of East Bengal, presently Bangladesh. She studied till class VIII in the face of tremendous poverty and completed the Matric degree after marriage. Her unswerving courage and dedication towards studies was evident from her completion of basic teachers’ training with the distinction of being first class first even as she was raising her child and living in a hostel. She joined the Calcutta Corporation School as a teacher and retired from her job in 1996. Read more…

OBITUARY: SHAH CHAND

(ML Update, 4-10 November)

 

Comrade Shah Chand Mukhiya, beloved popular leader from Jehanabad-Arwal, loved and respected as the “Nelson Mandela of Bihar”, passed away on 2 November. A wave of grief enveloped the whole area with the news of his demise. His funeral procession was taken out from his village Bhadasi on 3 November, and a sea of people turned out for one last sight of their beloved leader. Long queues of men and women lined both sides of the road from Bhadasi to Karbala, and more joined in as the procession proceeded. The mourners included Party General Secretary Com. Dipankar Bhattacharya, Com. Kunal, Com. Ramjatan Sharma, Dhirendra Jha, Amar, Meena Tiwari, Saroj Choube, Anwar Hussain, Rajaram Singh, Raldu Singh, Wasi Ahmad, Suhail, and other leaders. Earlier, Com. Dipankar met Com. Shah Chand’s wife Com. Jameela Khatoon and sons, and consoled them with the assurance that every single Party worker stands with them. Read more…

EDITORIAL – SIX MONTHS LATER

Vinod Mubayi

 

Six months into his term Modi’s electoral magic, which dipped slightly in the September by-elections in U.P. and Bihar, seems to have recovered.  In Maharashtra, BJP doubled its erstwhile tally of seats to emerge as the largest single party though it fell short of a majority. In Haryana on the other hand, BJP had a ten-fold increase in seats (from 4 to 47) and emerged as the majority party.  While Modi can claim credit for this result, another factor, the decimation of the Congress Party in both states, should not be overlooked. Read more…

MODI’S IDEA OF INDIA

Pankaj Mishra

 

India, V.S. Naipaul declared in 1976, is “a wounded civilization,” whose obvious political and economic dysfunction conceals a deeper intellectual crisis. As evidence, he pointed out some strange symptoms he noticed among upper-caste middle-class Hindus since his first visit to his ancestral country in 1962. These well-born Indians betrayed a craze for “phoren” consumer goods and approval from the West, as well as a self-important paranoia about the “foreign hand.” “Without the foreign chit,” Mr. Naipaul concluded, “Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.” Read more…

DOORDARSHAN AS RSS’S PUBLICITY AGENT: DANGEROUS HINDUTVA PORTENTS

Praful Bidwai

 

Hindutva crossed another red line in Indian politics on October 3 when the state-owned Doordarshan news channel made a live broadcast, for the first time ever, of the Vijayadashami (Dussehra) address of a Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh chief.  Read more…

A PROPOSAL FOR JOINING HANDS TO SAVE SECULARISM

Gautam Chaudhuri

 

Upsurge of religious communalism/fundamentalism is nothing new in this sub-continent, each time taking its toll. Secularism in true sense has never got its root deep and been sincerely practiced by the authority in our country too. Inheritance of the communal contamination of our freedom movement and the partition of the country has paved the hardcore communal forces the privilege to get their ideological influence spread over the society, even within our civil administration, the police, the army, the judiciary and everything—with also deliberate infiltration of trained cadres—and causing mayhem time and again as witnessed in demolition of Babri Masjid, post-Godhra genocide in Gujarat, blasts in Samjhauta express, in Malegaon, at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad—to mention a few. Murder of ATS chief Hemant Karkare on 26/11/2008 during the militant attack in Mumbai also point to a deep seated conspiracy against the nation in connivance with Israeli militant groups like Mossad. All these make it a compulsion for the true secular individuals and groups of the country to build a strong secular popular front to combat the menace of communalism in this country, nay, the sub-continent. Read more…

“HER”

A POEM

Khawla Zainab Read more…

BJP’s MORONIC THESIS ON RAPES

A while ago, the Chief of RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) proclaimed that there are no rapes in Bharat; they take place in India. Read more…

ISLAM FOR PEACE, OR VIOLENCE?

Javed Anand

 

Until recently, often in private and sometimes publicly, the complaint was voiced that moderate Muslims do not speak out or not loudly enough against Muslim extremism, militant Islam. Now, curiously, the ongoing savagery of the Islamic State has prompted the high priests of “New Atheism” (for whom “moderate Muslim” is an oxymoron) to turn their guns against liberals in general. Read more…

THE BACKWARD MUSLIMS

Irfan Engineer

 

Two years ago, I was invited to speak at a two day convention of Backward Muslims  organized by “Tehrik-e-Pasmanda Muslim Samaj” in Patna. Translated, the name would mean movement of backward Muslim communities. Read more…

INTERMARRIAGE IS NOT JIHAD, IT IS INDIA

Saif Ali Khan

 

When Kareena [a Hindu by birth] and I [a muslim by birth} married, there were similar death threats, with people on the Net saying ridiculous things about “love jihad”. We follow whatever religion or spiritual practice we believe in. Read more…

MALALA YOUSUFZAI: THE PRIDE OF PAKISTAN, BUT SHE CAN’T GO HOME

Kamila Shamsie

 

Take that, Islamic extremists, anti-Muslim bigots, Pashtun-bashers and misogynists! Malala Yousufzai has become the youngest person to win any Nobel prize and, fittingly, did not appear before the media to respond for several hours because it was a school day, and the girl’s got priorities. Read more…

SENDING PAKISTAN TO MARS

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

When spacecraft Mangalyaan successfully entered the Martian orbit in late September after a 10-month journey, India erupted in joy. Costing more than an F-16 but less than a Rafale, Mangalyaan’s meticulous planning and execution established India as a space-faring country. Although Indians had falsely celebrated their five nuclear tests of 1998 — which were based upon well-known physics of the 1940s — the Mars mission is a true accomplishment. Read more…

HOW TV PROMOTED TERRORISM IN PAKISTAN

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

IF today, with remote in hand, you randomly flip through channels on your TV, or browse through nearly two dozen online newspapers, you will see video clips or photos of Pakistan Air Force jets pounding targets in North Waziristan, artillery firing into the mountains, or, perhaps, some other celebration of Operation Zarb-i-Azb. But hang on! You rub your eyes. Our jets bombing Islamic fighters within the territory of this Islamic republic? Read more…

SATYARTHI’S NOBEL IS A CHEER – AND A WARNING FOR INDIA

Praful Bidwai

 

The award of the Nobel Peace prize to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai has been widely welcomed in India. This is doubtless positive for the cause of children’s rights. But it’s also a comment on how the world looks at the social reality of an India that struts about as an “emerging power” but tolerates large-scale abuse and merciless exploitation of children. Read more…

‘RIP VAN WINKLE’ AND RAMAN SINGH GOVERNMENT

Subhash Gatade

 

Can an elected Panchayat deprive a section of its own people belonging to a minority community its constitutionally granted right to practice its religion – e.g. organize prayers or engage in religious propaganda and have sermons? Read more…

MULTI-CULTURAL HERITAGE: GODHARA MUSLIMS CELEBRATE DANDIYA WITH HINDU FRIENDS

Godhara. India is unique—the city associated with the infamous 2002 anti-Muslim riots, resonated this Navratri with Dandiya-Garba festivities organized by a leading Muslim personality.  The incident revealed also, that this was no chance occurrence; Muslims of Godhara and Gujarat have been at the forefront of Dandiya-Garba events since centuries. Read more…

FOR A PLACE ON THE WORLD STAGE

Arun Kumar

 

India seems to be happy to get from the big economic powers things such as surplus capital, technology, trains, cleanliness, education and so on. This also spells its weakness 67 years after Independence. We rejoice at getting the basics from others while giving in return our best minds and yoga. Read more…

LETTER ON THE FUTURE OF NREGA

Shri Narendra Modi 13 October 2014

Prime Minister of India Read more…

OF DIRT AND CLEANLINESS – SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN

Nityanand Jayaraman

 

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign) is powerful in its simplicity, and problematic for the same reason. The absence of complexity in the presentation of the campaign, and the inherent contradictions between Modi’s consumerist growth agenda and SwachhBharat’s objectives fuels my skepticism and raises many questions: Which parts of India will be cleaned, which not and why not? What will we do with the wastes we remove?  Where will we put it? Read more…

THE BANGLADESH WE ALL LONG FOR

Uday Sankar Das

 

The scars inflicted on September 29, 2012 in Ramu will take a long time to heal.

 

It has been two years now since a number of Buddhist monasteries and houses of Buddhists were razed to the ground in Ramu, Ukhia, Teknaf, and Cox’s Bazar on a night of mayhem on September 29, 2012. This carnage no doubt tarnished the image of Bangladesh both at home and abroad. The events, painful as they were and still are, still rekindled hopes about the kind of country we fought for and long for. Read more…

INDIA: TWO LAWS ON CENSORSHIP

Pankaj Butalia

 

Two individuals stand at opposite ends of the film-censorship spectrum in India: One a Bollywood filmmaker, Vishal Bhardwaj, who made Haider, and the other a young documentary filmmaker, Shubhradeep Chakravorty, who made En Dino Muzaffarnagar, a documentary on last year’s riots. Bhardwaj, who agreed to 41 cuts, was able to state in his film that the Indian army was responsible for the disappearance of Kashmiri men in 1995, blew up homes at will, tortured people in the most brutal way and let loose a counter-terrorism force that played havoc with Kashmiri society. He was also able to incorporate in his film another holy cow of a censorious society: incest. Read more…

IS MODI TRYING TO TURN INDIA INTO ONE GIANT ‘LAWLESS’ SEZ?

Nirjhari Sinha

 

When Modi became the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, one of his primary focus was to build as many Special Economic Zones (SEZs) as he could to make his industrialist friends happy. According to Gujarat Government, there are presently 55 SEZs in Gujarat covering an area of approximately 27,125 hectares. Some of the SEZs have been given away to his close friends, Ambani, Adani and Tata. For eg, Adani got the Dholera and Mundra SEZ, Reliance got the Reliance SEZ, while Tata got the Tata SEZ. Read more…

HAS PM MODI BOWED TO US PRESSURE ON PATENT LAWS?

Rema Nagarajan,

 

A paragraph buried in the US-India joint statement, which talks of establishing an annual high-level Intellectual Property (IP) working group as part of the Trade Policy Forum, has made health activists across the world apprehensive that the Modi government might be bending to US pressure to change its patent laws. Several health policy experts and activists have issued statements urging India not to give in to US pressure and pointing out that India’s IPR policy was compliant with the WTO’s trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) agreement as it used health safeguards available in the agreement to protect the interests of Indian patients as well as millions of people in other developing countries Read more…

PRICES OF LIFE-SAVING DRUGS INCREASED BY THE MODI GOVERNMENT

“Bimaron ke acchhe din aa gaye hain?”

 

Daya Varma

 

The outgoing United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government had initiated a “Right to Health” scheme and kept the price of drugs at controlled prices. Despite this scheme the prices were still high given the resources of the Indian population. Read more…

JOIN INTERNATIONAL FRONT AGAINST RELIGIOUS-RIGHT AND FOR SECULARISM

Petition by Maryam Namazie (London, UK)

 

Our era is marked by the rise of the religious-Right – not because of a “religious revival” but rather due to the rise of far-Right political movements and states using religion for political supremacy. This rise is a direct consequence of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism and the social policies of communalism and cultural relativism. Universalism, secularism and citizenship rights have been abandoned and segregation of societies and “communities” based on ethnicity, religion and culture have become the norm. Read more…

AWAMI WORKERS PARTY FIRST CONGRESS

Awami Workers Party held its first congress on September  27-28, 2014 at   Islamabad, Pakistan. Read more…

THE WRITERS FORUM CONDEMNED THE POLICE SUPPRESSION ON FORWARD PRESS

The writers’s forum and other organisations came in support of the ‘ Bahujan- Shraman’ issue of Forward Press and condemned the police action against it. Janwadi Lekhak Sangh issued a press release today (written below) while forum for  freedom of expression marked a protest March in Bhagalpur Bihar. The Convenor of forum, Om Sudha  asked the Home Ministry to immediate withdraw the FIR , lodged against ‘ Forward Press.’ Read more…

SURREY-WHALLEY MLA BRUCE RALSTON TO RECEIVE DR. AMBEDKAR SOCIAL JUSTICE AWARD

Surrey (BC) – The veteran MLA from Surrey-Whalley, Bruce Ralston, will be presented the Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award 2014 at an October 14 ceremony, President of Chetna Association of Canada Surinder Ranga announced. Read more…

COLUMBUS DAY AND THE SANITIZATION OF HISTORY

Owen McCormack

 

The strife that has engulfed Christopher Columbus’ legacy in recent years has put the concept of an Indigenous People’s Day at the forefront of discussion. Read more…

OBITUARY: BALRAJ PURI (1928-2014)

Manoranjan Mohanty

 

For more than half a century, Balraj Puri was a journalist, political thinker, federalist, human rights activist, socialist democrat and much more. He spoke for Jammu and Kashmir and of Jammu and Kashmir to the rest of the world and was widely respected in the state. A tribute by a friend of many decades. Read more…

OVER 600 NRIS PROTEST MODI AT SPIRITED RALLY IN NEW YORK

Over 600 people participated in a spirited rally in New York on Sunday, September 28 opposing, Modi and Hindutva, while Modi was being feted inside the Madison Square Garden (MSG) arena by a section of India’s diaspora. Read more…

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES CONTINUE

EDITORIAL

 

Indian State has a long history of repressing the democratic rights of the people inherited from the practices of the British Raj and strengthened in successive years by passing anti-democratic laws. Read more…

MASS ARREST IN TELANGANA AND ANDHRA PRADESH: BLACK DAYS OF EMERGENCY ARE HERE AGAIN?

Coordination of Democratic Rights Organization

 

The AP and Telangana State governments have coercively prevented the one day convention of the FORUM FOR ALTERNATIVE POLITICS in Hyderabad on 21 Sep 2014 from being held. This is a most condemnable, undemocratic and unconstitutional acts of the two governments. Read more…

SPREADING FEAR THROUGH STEREOTYPES: THE POLITICS OF ‘LOVE JIHAD’

Praful Bidwai

 

How does Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lofty slogan Sab ka Saath, Sab ka Vikaas (inclusion and development for all) square up with India’s social-political reality as vulnerable groups such as the religious minorities experience it? The honest answer is that these groups had the most to fear from a Bharatiya Janata Party election victory, and some of their fears are coming true. The BJP’s leaders, Mr Modi included, have done very little to allay them although it’s their duty to do so. Read more…

TOOLS FOR DIVISIVE POLITICS: HATE SPEECH AND PATRIARCHY

Ram Puniyani

 

After the last general elections where Narendra Modi and his party won a majority overwhelmingly, the BJP has not been doing so well in subsequent by-elections. The Lalu-Nitish experiment is one model, but whether it will be replicated in different parts of the country is a million-vote question. Read more…

KASHMIR FLOODS: ACCHHE DIN SLOGAN TURNS BITTER FOR J&K RESIDENTS

Editors

 

Modi’s slogan acchhe din aane wale hain (better days are about to come) that helped him and his party win the election has no doubt turned bitter for the flood-ravaged residents of Jammu and Kashmir. Almost 300 are reported to have died and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless and are living in flimsy makeshift shelters without adequate supply of food or water. Read more…

COMMUNITIES IMPACTED BY FLOODS IN PAKISTAN – 2014

Roots for Equity, Pakistan NGO (Abridged)

 

The recent floods sweeping through Pakistan have affected thousands of communities in Punjab and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Thankfully, though the floods are not as devastating as of 2010, they have still created havoc in many communities costing nearly 300 lives to date. Read more…

THE MARS MISSION: LAURELS FOR INDIA

Com Space Research Organiation (ISRO) launched its Mars mission on November 5, 2013 by the Congress-led UPA government. It has now successfully entered into Mars orbit, a great achievement in space science. Below are two comments. Read more…

THE TRUTH THAT WILL NOT DIE: Tribute to Shubhradeep Chakravorty

Anand Patwardhan

 

“En Dino Muzaffarnagar by Shubhradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary is going to be recorded in history as the first documentary film banned under Prime Minister Modi. Gagging order came on 30th June. Today we applied in Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) for redressal of our grievances. We will not go down without a fight.” Read more…

RSS REWRITES HISTORY: DALITS ‘CREATED’ BY INVADERS

DK Singh

 

In its renewed impetus to woo Dalits, various other castes and sub-castes, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has embarked on an ambitious exercise to re-write history. Read more…

INQUILAB ZINDABAD, LAL SALAAM ECHOES IN KOLKATA

 

 

Unprecedented is too mild an epithet to describe the Saturday rally by Kolkata students. The number is most conservatively [by the police] 80,000 and by watchers 1,10,000 and more because no one can count the real number as the end of the rally could not even come out of Nandan complex when the starting was getting fully drenched at the end point in Mayo Road where it was blocked. Read more…

LOVE COMMANDOS COUNTER LOVE JIHAD, UNITE 30,000 COUPLES

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-love-commandos-unite-to-counter-concept-of-love-jihad-brings-30000-couples-together-2020329

 

At a time when the country is being exposed to an oxymoronic term ‘ love jihad, countering such a concept is an organization with an equally paradoxical name called ‘Love Commandos’. Read more…

AISA SWEEPS JNU STUDENT UNION ELECTIONS ONCE AGAIN

Doubles Votes To Emerge As Significant Third Force in DUSU Elections Read more…

NATIONAL CONVENTION OF WORKERS

A National Convention of Workers was held on 15TH September 2014 at New Delhi, under the banner of joint platform of all the Central Trade Unions of the country. The Convention was held in protest against the policies of Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization and the all-out attack on trade union/working class rights by the Modi government and the Rajasthan government. Read more…

DECLARATION OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF WORKERS

(September 15, 2014,  New Delhi)

 

This National Convention of Workers being held under the banner of joint platform of all the Central Trade Unions of the country along with independent national federations/organizations from all the sectors and service establishments expresses deep concern at the unilateral move to amend the labour laws by a number of state governments and by the Central Govt. Most of the amendments sought to be done will have serious negative impact on the working conditions including trade union rights of the workers and the employees. Read more…

THE CAUSE OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN WESTERN UP

Sadiq Naqvi

 

Tanweer Fazal, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, explains the reasons for communal disharmony in Western UP. Read more…

HUNDRED DAYS OF MODI POINTS TO EMERGENT DISASTER

Economy, Religious Extremism and Human Rights Areas of Biggest Concern

 

The Ghadar Alliance, a US-based educational/watchdog coalition created by concerned citizens in the wake of the BJP victory, today released a comprehensive ‘100-day report’ evaluating the performance of the Modi government’s first 100 days in office. The report, titled “Fast Track to Troubling Times,” (modifacts.org) is being released as Modi prepares for his first visit to the US as India’s Prime Minister. Modi’s US tour begins on September 26th. Read more…

MY NAME IS KHAN AND I AM A HINDU

Ishita Mishra

 

 

Agra: If there is one place in India that just doesn’t get the idea of ‘Love jihad’, it is Khera Sadhan in Agra. And that’s because of its peculiar history. During the rule of Aurangzeb (1658-1707), villagers there were asked to either convert to Islam or leave their homes. Faced with such a threat, almost all of them had changed their religion at that time. After Independence, a group of local leaders exhorted the townsfolk to go back to Hinduism. Some did, others didn’t. But religion since then hasn’t mattered to the people here. Read more…

GREEN CLEARANCE TEST FOR NDA

Sunita Narain

 

Environmentalists are rightly alarmed that the NDA government is busy dismantling the environmental regulatory system in the country. Over the past two months, the media has reported that clearances for projects, from mining to roads, have been fast-tracked. While the website of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) has not been updated in August, in the two months till July end, forest clearance was granted to over 92 projects, which will divert some 1,600 hectares of forest. More recently, it was reported that the National Board for Wildlife has processed many projects located near or in sanctuaries and national parks. Read more…

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