AGAINST MILITARISTIC NATIONALISM: WE MUST REMEMBER THAT ZIONISM AND HINDUTVA DO NOT REPRESENT JUDAISM AND HINDUISM

EPW

 

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to India from 14 to 19 January 2018 completes 25 years since the two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1992, following the victory of the United States (US) over the Soviet Union in the protracted Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel from 4 to 6 July 2017 came in a year that marked the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration by the British occupying government in 1917, asserting the objective of establishing a Jewish “National Home” in Palestine, a promise British imperialism had made to the Zionists. Read more…

THE SLAIN ‘MILITANT’ WAS A MODEL, AND A KARACHI POLICE COMMANDER IS OUT

Meher Ahmadjan

 

KARACHI, Pakistan — A top Karachi police commander known for harsh tactics has been forced out after what he called a shootout with the Taliban ended in the death of an aspiring model popular on social media, triggering days of protests. Read more…

INDIA’S RICHEST 1% CORNER 73% OF WEALTH GENERATION: SURVEY

PTI

 

DAVOS: The richest 1% in India cornered 73% of the wealth generated in the country last year, a new survey showed today, presenting a worrying picture of rising income inequality. Read more…

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE POVERTY OF PAKISTANI IDEOLOGY: AN INTERVIEW WITH TAIMUR RAHMAN

Last year, Pakistan’s government nearly fell. Denouncing alleged vote rigging in the 2013 general election, opposition leader Imran Khan organized what he called the Azadi March in protest. Read more…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Dekhiye paate hain Ushaaq buton se kya faiz

Ik barahman ne kaha hai ke ye saal achcha hai Read more…

DOES THE BJP’S GUJARAT STRATEGY TELL US HOW IT WILL CAMPAIGN IN 2019?

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan

 

Win or lose in the state, it seems likely that the party will now deploy unbridled Hindutva and attempt to portray its opponents as anti-national. Read more…

HITLER’S HINDUS: THE RISE AND RISE OF INDIA’S NAZI-LOVING NATIONALISTS

Shrenik Rao

 

July 2008. I was on a cycling expedition, from the southernmost tip of India to its most northern state. Along the way, I took a pit stop at Nagpur, the geographic center of India and the epicenter of Hindu nationalism. There, I saw a building with a bizarre name: “Hitlers Den.” A pool parlor, its walls were emblazoned with tacky Nazi insignia, and on its shopfront – a swastika on full public display. Read more…

BREAKING DOWN BABRI: THE EVENT, THE AFTERMATH, THE VERDICT

EPW Meta-Report

 

India changed as a nation with the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. The events of the day have not only permeated the social and political fabric of the country, they unfurled a series of events that have led to the creation of a new normal. Read more…

PAKISTAN: AFTER FAIZABAD – WHAT IS TO BE DONE ?

Ammar Rashid

 

There has been a tangible sense of despair among liberal and progressive commentators in the wake of the state’s capitulation to the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLYRA) at Faizabad. Read more…

FIVE YEARS AFTER DEADLY FACTORY FIRE, BANGLADESH’S GARMENT WORKERS ARE STILL VULNERABLE

Rebecca Prentice & Geert De Neve

 

Exactly five years ago, in November 2012, a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh killed at least 112 workers. Probably caused by a short circuit on the ground floor of the building, the fire rapidly spread up the nine floors where garment workers were trapped due to narrow or blocked fire escapes. Many died inside the building or while seeking an escape through the windows. Read more…

CELEBRATION AND INTROSPECTION: REFLECTIONS ON THE CENTURY-OLD OSMANIA UNIVERSITY

K Srinivasulu

 

The Osmania University, now a 100 years old, has, especially from the 1940s onwards, played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual, social, cultural and political life of Telangana. But tragically, the present dismal state of affairs in its portals does not befit its centenary status. Sincere support from the Government of Telangana is the need of the hour. Read more…

QUEER RIGHTS AND THE PUTTASWAMY JUDGMENT

Danish Sheikh

 

The Puttaswamy judgment is a significant development for the future of legal interventions involving sexual minorities. When it comes to the constitutional challenge of Section 377, the judgment’s acknowledgement of the “chilling effect” vis-à-vis constitutional rights and repudiation of the de minimis rule as it pertains to constitutional harms is crucial in challenging the Supreme Court’s decision in the Suresh Kumar Koushal case. Read more…

THE COURAGE TO CHALLENGE THE NUCLEAR WORLD ORDER

M V Ramana and Zia Mian

 

In July 2017, 122 countries adopted the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. To mark this historic achievement, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in recognition of its work over the past decade to make this treaty possible. This article reflects on the nuclear disarmament activism that led up to the formation of ICAN and the new treaty, and the challenges this now poses to the nuclear weapon states. Read more…

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLASS?

Vivek Chibber

 

Not so long ago, activists and intellectuals who regarded themselves as progressive had a pretty clear idea of what this entailed. Then, as now, it carried a commitment to democratic rights, to equality, to fighting gender and racial domination. But it also meant a deep and abiding opposition to capitalism. To be radical was to be anti-capitalist. Read more…

EDITORIAL: 100 YEARS OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The so-called “October Revolution” of 1917 actually dates to November 7, getting its name because November 7 was designated October 25 in the Old Style Calendar. So this issue of INSAF is the closest to the centenary celebration. One of India’s leading commentators on the left has written an important article, reproduced below, that summarizes the impact of the Bolshevik revolution on India and the current status of the left in Indian politics. Read more…

AFTER  ONE  HUNDRED  YEARS  OF  THE  RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION,  WHERE  DOES  THE  LEFT  STAND ?

Sumanta Banerjee

 

The  history  of  the  1917  Russian  Revolution  and  its  aftermath,  can  be  divided  into  four  phases: Read more…

THE REPUBLIC OF COWARDICE

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

 

The controversy over the film Padmavati once again reminded us that the fragility of our identities, the layers of resentment that constitute our sense of self, the emboldening of the most lumpen elements in our society, intellectual confusions over the law, and the sheer lack of constitutional courage in most of our politicians make India increasingly unfit for liberty. Read more…

WHY ABBA MUST GO

Reetika Khera

 

Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication does nothing in the battle against graft — there are better alternatives. Read more…

INDIAN MEDIA FACING PERSECUTION AND CONTROL

Pushkar Raj

 

The filing of a criminal defamation suit of 1 billion rupees (US$15.3 million) against news portal The Wire for publishing a story about the accumulation of wealth by the son of the president of the ruling  Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a revelation of how the Indian media are battling for credibility and survival. Read more…

THE REVOLUTION AND RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

Rohini Hensman

 

Unlike Western imperialism, which colonised overseas territories, the Tsarist empire expanded by annexing adjacent territories from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. Read more…

THE QAU STRIKE EXPLAINED

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

Quaid-e-Azam University has finally reopened although student attendance is low and university buses are anchored off campus to avoid being damaged once again by protesters. The days ahead are uncertain. Read more…

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT IN INDIA?

Roshan Kishore

 

The Communist Part of India (Marxist)’s atrophy in West Bengal has dealt a body blow to the Left’s influence in Indian politics. If the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, is to make a comeback, it will have to regain its lost hegemony in West Bengal. Read more…

STORIES OF A RAJPUT QUEEN

Harbans Mukhia

 

The Mewar royal descendant Vishwajeet Singh’s recent differentiation, in a newspaper article, between history and fiction with regard to the film Padmavati, came as a refreshing surprise. I recount here the historical facts and the popular versions of the story. Read more…

GAINED IN TRANSLATION: THE REMNANTS OF A RAGA

Manglesh Dabral

 

When I arrived in Delhi, I suddenly felt that I have been banished from a raga. When I saw the last tree of my village diminishing away, the absence of that raga made its home within me. Read more…

ECONOMY: DEMONETISATION – A YEAR AFTER: A SURGICAL PLUNDER

Pritam Singh

 

Demonetisation, hyped as an economic policy of ‘surgical strike’ against black money and terrorism, can be viewed with hindsight as more of ‘carpet bombing’ on Indian people especially those in the informal economy. Read more…

BANKING ON BAILOUT: RECAPITALISATION WILL INCREASE GOVERNMENT’S FISCAL DEFICIT

Pritam Singh

 

THE NDA government has spun a narrative that seems to have dazzled some observers that this government is now, after demonetisation and GST fiascos, embarking on bold economic growth measures. Read more…

AYODHYA DISPUTE: SUPREMACY OF CONSTITUTION OR FAITH?

Irfan Engineer

 

Babri Masjid is once again in news. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has taken an initiative to bring all stake holders for negotiating an out of court settlement. Apparently the initiative is in his personal capacity. However, Sri Sri Ravi Sahnkar is well connected with the BJP leaders. Read more…

LABOUR’S LOST AGENCY: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN SRI LANKA?

Balasingham Skanthakumar

 

Early each morning at the main bus stands of the Biyagama and Katunayake export processing zones near Colombo’s international airport, a few thousand men mill around. Their purpose is not travel but to meet the ‘brokers’ or representatives of recruitment agents, who hire on the spot based on ‘orders’ for workers received from factory human-resource managers. Read more…

EDITORIAL: MODI’S “ACCHHE DIN” SEEM TO BE TURNING SOUR

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Modi and BJP’s triumphal march across the Indian political landscape for the last three and a half years now seems to be slowing down if not going into reverse. Those who believe in the promise of the Indian Constitution for a secular and democratic polity can now afford to breathe just a tad more freely as the poisonous hot air balloon of the regime appears to have begun to deflate a little. As the poet Faiz said once: “Roshan kahin bahar ke imkan hue to hain.” (Some possibilities of spring seem to be emerging.) Read more…

WHY ISN’T NARENDRA MODI TALKING ABOUT THE ‘GUJARAT MODEL’ ANYMORE?

Swati Chaturvedi

 

Narendra Modi, as three-time Gujarat chief minister, won the Bharatiya Janata Party an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha on the basis of his “vikas” (development) track record and the mega publicised “Gujarat model”. Isn’t it perplexing, then, that Modi, who by no means can be described as modest, is not fighting the Gujarat elections on that same record? Read more…

MISSION 350 OR NON-MISSION 200?

Sunil Sharan

 

It was all going swimmingly well. 2019 all locked up with 350 seats. Until the economy tanked. Read more…

CHANGING POLITICAL WEATHER: BJP GETS THE CHILLS

Mitali Saran

 

The weather in Delhi is finally turning, as is public opinion in India. The bluster and gloating is gone. Three and a half years into the Modi government, those who never liked the BJP are furious and openly derisive. Read more…

SECTARIANISM SUPPRESSING DEMOCRATIC RIGHT OF EXPRESSION

Ram Puniyani

 

Freedom of expression has been the core value which accompanied the struggle for India’s Independence. Read more…

PAKISTAN’S EDUCATED JIHADI’S

Muhammad Suleman

 

The recent trend in Pakistan is of the gradual penetration of radicalization and religious violent extremism into academic institutions. Traditionally, there were the madaris (religious seminaries) that played a vibrant role in breeding the jihadists and promoting religious violent extremism and terrorism in the society. Read more…

INDIA BECOMING DANGEROUS FOR INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL ACTIVISTS

Pushkar Raj

 

When journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead in front of her house early last month, quite a few writers and social activists in India must have felt a chill down their spines as the country steadily becomes a dangerous place for intellectuals. Read more…

ON HIS BIRTH ANNIVERSARY, KARWAN-E-MOHABBAT MAKES FINAL STOP AT GANDHI’S BIRTHPLACE

Mari Marcel Thek Aekara

 

Porbandar: It’s a bit surreal, staying in a small, rather seedy, very dirty little hotel surrounded by members of the Sangh Parivar. Around mid-day, the president of India, with Amit Shah, will do the usual – start the honours for commemorating Gandhi Jayanti in Porbandar. Read more…

#I-AM-GAURI’ EVENT IN MUMBAI

Anand Patwardhan

 

October 5 marks one month after the murder of the journalist, rationalist and anti-communal activist, Gauri Lankesh. In the last four years, three other rationalists, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, Comrade Pansare and Dr. M.M Kalburgi were gunned down in an almost identical manner. Read more…

INDIAN CHILDREN SUFFER FROM INFANT STARVATION AND HUNGER

Sabrangindia Staff

 

While other countries have improved, we have not. This fall to 100th place (of 119) on the hunger index is registered for India at a time when the 2017 Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows long term progress in reducing hunger in the world. Read more…

EDITORIAL: SOUTH ASIA IN THE SPOTLIGHT (OR CROSSHAIRS)

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The murder of Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru on September 5 by motorcycle riding terrorists brought the emergence of Indian fascism into the spotlight in a most chilling fashion, highlighting the utter vulnerability of all activists who dare to oppose Hindutva. Lankesh was a fearless journalist who wielded her pen to oppose and expose the criminalization of political and cultural life under the current rulers of the country. Read more…

OBSERVE OCTOBER 2 AS A PROTEST DAY: AN APPEAL

Forum against the killing of Gauri Lankesh

 

Dear Concerned and Conscious Citizens,

 

The assassination of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh has evidently rung a strong alarm. Though the chain of resolve to condemn and resist the dastardly act exhibited across the nation is encouraging, much more needs to be done to counter the terror acts and save the precious dissident democratic spaces from the onslaught of fascist forces. Read more…

MESSAGE FROM TEESTA SETALVAD ON HER DETENTION AT VARANASI 

Dear Friends All,

 

This is a detailed communication to formally update you on the unfortunate situation as I arrived in Banaras yesterday. The CISF personnel received me at the airport. (Security provided as per orders of the Hon SC). Read more…

INDIA’S STUDENTS FACE BRUNT OF BJP WRATH AS RESISTANCE GATHERS PACE IN VARSITIES

 

The Citizen Editorial

 

The very first action by the Modi government when it came to power was against students in Jawaharlal Nehru University where the full might of the state was evident in trying to crack the Left bastion, and arrest and jail student leaders. Read more…

I KNOW WHO IS BEHIND MY DEATH: A PAKISTANI JOURNALIST’S REACTON TO GAURI LANKESH’S MURDER

Hamid Mir

 

Gauri Lankesh received three bullets in her body and died. I got seven bullets, but survived. I know I’m really lucky to be alive. Gauri’s terrible death made me search for other similarities — perhaps, I want her friends and family, my readers, anyone, someone, to know that I understand the pain and the grief and the anger, all twisted into one emotion, that follows when Death comes calling. Read more…

PAKISTAN: BACKDOOR ELECTORAL MAINSTREAMING OUTFITS CONNECTED WITH HATE-BASED POLITICS – IS THAT THE FUTURE?

Editorial, Dawn, September 20, 2017

 

In the long term, the by-election result may be remembered most for the candidates who finished third and fourth. Read more…

THE ROHINGYA GENOCIDE AND INADEQUATE RESPONSE FROM BANGLADESH

Taj Hashmi

 

I believe “genocide” is the right word to describe the ongoing mass killing, rape, and expropriation of Rohingyas in Mayanmar. Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) first used the expression in 1943, to denote the mass killings, rapes, torture, extortions, and marginalization of Jews and others in Axis-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Read more…

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER AMAL CLOONEY URGES SRI LANKAN AUTHORITIES TO ENSURE SAFETY OF FORMER MALDIVES PRESIDENT NASHEED

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka, 14 September 2017

 

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney is urging Sri Lankan authorities to respect the rights and ensure the safety of her client and former President of the Maldives Mohammed Nasheed should  he set foot in the country. Read more…

IT’S LONELY ON THE GROUND: RTI ACT NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED 

Christophe Jaffrelot , Basim U Nissa

 

In April, the government of India proposed amendments to the RTI Act, one of the most empowering pieces of legislation inherited from the UPA era. The most controversial amendment pertained to Rule 12. It would allow the withdrawal of an application in case of the applicant’s death, making the job of those who file RTIs even more risky. Read more…

TRIPLE TALAQ: CRITICAL OF GOVT, MUSLIM LAW BOARD WILL NOT FILE REVIEW

Abantika Ghosh, Milind Ghatwai

 

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) executive committee meeting on Sunday did not discuss filing a review petition against the Supreme Court order holding instant triple talaq illegal. Sources said during informal discussions it was felt that a review plea may throw open more religious practices like polygamy to judicial scrutiny. Read more…

REREADING DAS KAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Vamsi Vakulabharanam

 

Marx’s Capital (three volumes) offers a unified framework to make sense of some of the most troubling issues facing humanity today, in particular, rising economic inequality, deepening economic instability, and growing unsustainability of human–nature interactions, signifying a looming planetary crisis. To the extent that the text throws light on capitalism in the abstract that transcends the unique features of the English or European context, it offers us various insights and critiques about how to understand and intervene in societies beyond Europe. Read more…

MARXISM AND NATIONALISM – NATION AND NATIONALISM

Achin Vanaik

 

In the broad social sciences as well as in the discourse on politics, there is no consensus on how we should understand the nation – what its origins are, or on its meaning and value. By contrast there is widespread acceptance that nationalism – whether understood as doctrine, ideology, sentiment, identity or movement – is a modern phenomenon. Read more…

EDITORIAL: PAKISTAN-INDIA RELATIONS AT 70: A DISPIRITING PICTURE

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Two inspiring speeches were made in mid-August 1947. On August 11, Jinnah outlined his hopes for a non-sectarian Pakistan when he said “You are free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. Read more…

EDITORIAL: ANOTHER YEAR OF MODI AND BJP: HAVE THE “ACCHHE DIN” ARRIVED?

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Prime Minister Modi made many promises of “acchhe din” (good days) after gaining power but all he has shown so far is an acumen for keeping his political opposition divided and winning elections, gaining “acchhe din” no doubt for himself and his cohorts. Read more…

RANA AYYUB SPEAKS IN MONTREAL – THE DIASPORA HAS A VERY IMPORTANT ROLE FOR INDIA TODAY

Dolores Chew

 

As part of her Canadian tour the famed and very courageous award-winning journalist and author Rana Ayyub (Gujarat Files: anatomy of a cover up) came to Montreal. Read more…

RANA AYYUB IN VANCOUVER: SOLIDARITY WITH “NOT IN MY NAME”

Chin Banerjee

 

In an expression of solidarity with the movement of protest against mob lynchings in India organized under the banner of “NOT IN MY NAME,” the recently formed, “Indians Abroad for Plural India” organized a talk by visiting journalist, Rana Ayyub, in Vancouver on August 27. Read more…

INDIA: STATEMENT OF WOMEN’S GROUPS & CONCERNED INDIVIDUALS ON THE SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT ON TRIPLE TALAQ

22 AUGUST 2017

 

We wholeheartedly welcome the judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the matter of Triple Talaq brought before it by a number of Muslim women and Muslim women’s rights groups. In arguing that the practice of Triple Talaq is both un-Quranic and Un-Constitutional, it is an important departure from earlier judgments on all women’s rights, because it is based on the tenets of equality, dignity and secularism as enshrined in the Constitution. Read more…

INDIA: SECULAR CIVIL CODE – WITH TRIPLE TALAQ STRUCK DOWN, IT’S TIME TO REFORM OTHER UNJUST FAITH-BASED LAWS

Girish Shahane

 

The Supreme Court’s divided judgement on instant divorce is a tiny step in the right direction. Read more…

TRIPLE TALAQ VERDICT, GENDER JUSTICE AND RSS COMBINE

L.S. Herdenia

 

 

The BJP and Sangh Parivar are celebrating Talaq judgment of Supreme Court and claiming credit for liberating Muslim women from the male dominated Muslim society. But there is no evidence that they took any initiative for empowering Hindu women. On the contrary they took every possible step to stall a major initiative taken by our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and our first law minister Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Read more…

RIGHT TO PRIVACY: A BRAKE ON GOVERNMENT

Indira Jaising

 

Supreme Court has ruled that the right to privacy is a fundamental right of every citizen of the country. The landmark verdict was in response to many petitions filed in courts questioning the validity of a government scheme to assign a unique biometric identity card to every individual. Read more…

AN EPIC BATTLE HAS BEEN WON IN THE FIGHT FOR PRIVACY IN INDIA, BUT THE WAR ISN’T OVER

Devjyot Ghoshal

 

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an agency of the Government of India responsible for implementing the envisioned AADHAR a unique identification project in India. Read more…

DERA VIOLENCE: HOW BJP FUNDED & PROMOTED THE MONSTER CALLED RAM RAHIM SINGH

Aditya Menon, Anurag Dey

 

BJP is to blame for Dera violence. Haryana leaders gave Rs 1 cr (10 million) to #RamRahimSingh. Modi & Shah wooed him   At the root of Dera violence in Punjab & Haryana lies BJP-RSS nexus with #RamRahimSingh. Read more…

HINDUTVA RULE & ANARCHY ARE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

Shamsul Islam

 

Is it a coincidence that wherever we have BJP governments mobs rule/destroy unhindered? Go on the rampage? Read more…

GORAKHPUR TRAGEDY: ALLEGATIONS AGAINST KAFEEL AHMED FALSE, REVEAL HINDUTVA BRIGADE’S BIGOTRY

Sandipan Sharma

 

His name is Kafeel Ahmed Khan. So, how could he have been a hero? Read more…

INDIA: COL. PUROHIT – ARYAVARTA’S SOLDIER, NOT A MERE MOLE

Press release by JTSA (Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association)

 

The Malegaon accused Col. Purohit has been granted bail by the Supreme Court. We know that bail in terror cases, especially those involving bomb blasts, is rare, if not altogether impossible to secure. Read more…

INTERVIEW WITH THE DALIT LEADER JIGNESH MEVANI

Ilangovan Rajasekaran

 

In mid July 2016, a video of a few Dalit youths being beaten and paraded by a mob for skinning a dead cow in Una in Gujarat went viral and triggered a mass movement for Dalit assertion that probably had few parallels in the history of modern India. Read more…

INDIA: DISTORTION OF TRUTH AND THE UNDERMINING OF DEMOCRACY UNDER REIGN OF HINDUTVA

Ananya Vajpeyi

 

Between sophistry and silence

 

Can the ongoing devaluation of language and undermining of democracy be reversed?

The outgoing Vice President, M. Hamid Ansari, was subjected to one of the strangest send-offs in Parliament in the history of independent India. Read more…

HARASSMENT OF PROF. NIVEDITA MENON BY JNU ADMINISTRATION 

(Posted by Ayesha Kidwai . president, JNUTA in Facebook)

 

We, the undersigned women’s rights groups, activists and academics, are shocked to learn that the JNU administration has adopted a biased and mala fide procedure to institute an enquiry against Professor Nivedita Menon, eminent academic and well-known feminist who is Chairperson of the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Thought at the School of International Studies, JNU. Read more…

EDITORIAL: OPPORTUNISM POLITICS IN INDIA

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Political developments in Bihar, where the BJP has managed to fracture an opposition coalition, have been brought into acute focus the problem of envisaging a replacement for BJP and Modi from among the current political parties. Read more…

APPEASEMENT OF MINORITIES IS A MYTH

Ram Puniyani

 

The turmoil in Kashmir has worsened since the killing of Burhan Wani in an encounter last year (2016). The ceaseless protests, the handling of protests leading to deaths and blinding of many in Kashmir is very disturbing. Read more…

LOSING THE MIDDLE: MODI’S BJP MAY BE ALIENATING THE VYAPARI AS IT COURTS BIG CAPITAL AND THE UNDERCLASS

Harish Damodaran

 

Under Narendra Modi, the BJP has probably metamorphosed into a party more favourably disposed towards Big Capital in general. Read more…

YOU CAN’T PREACH SELF-RESPECT TO EMPTY STOMACHS’: INTERVIEW WITH THE DALIT LEADER JIGNESH MEVANI

Ilangovan Rajasekaran

 

In mid July 2016, a video of a few Dalit youths being beaten and paraded by a mob for skinning a dead cow in Una in Gujarat went viral and triggered a mass movement for Dalit assertion that probably had few parallels in the history of modern India. Read more…

PAINT THE UNITED COLOURS OF INDIA

Happymon Jacob

 

The Sangh Parivar’s saffron agenda must not dictate the country’s foreign policy Read more…

THE FFQ (FEDERATION OF QUEBEC WOMEN) DENOUNCES THE REMARKS OF THE PREMIER OF QUEBEC!

Montreal, June 26, 2017 – The Fédération des Femmes du Québec (FFQ) is outraged and deeply distressed by the remarks made by Premier Philippe Couillard on June 22 : “Islam cannot be dissociated from the acts committed in its name “. Read more…

CERAS (MONTREAL) RESOLUTION ON CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS

CERAS forwarded a resolution passed at its AGM in June, concerning the current situation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, to Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh High Commissioner to Canada for urgent action. Read more…

DINA NATH BATRA AGAIN: HE WANTS TAGORE, URDU WORDS OFF SCHOOL TEXTS

Along with five pages of recommendations, the Nyas, headed by Dina Nath Batra, a former head of Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, has attached pages from several NCERT textbooks, with the portions that it wants removed marked and underlined. Read more…

CERAS STATEMENT ON ATTACK ON HINDU PILGRIMS IN KASHMIR

CERAS condemns the fatal attack on Hindu pilgrims on their way to Amarnath, one of the most revered Hindu shrines, during this pilgrimage season. Read more…

BANGLADESH: COLOUR WITHIN THE LINES

Abak Hussain

 

What makes a portrait offensive? Why is a ruling party religious affairs secretary so concerned about a child’s artwork? Read more…

DISSECTING HINDUTVA: A CONVERSATION WITH JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA

Nagothu Naresh Kumar

 

It’s a good time to be a populist. Across the world, populism has made significant strides. Sanctimonious populism coupled with ironclad convictions seems to be the staple diet of contemporary politics. Read more…

PAKISTAN’S JIRGAS: BUYING PEACE AT THE EXPENSE OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS?

Ayesha Khan

 

Why are foreign donors so enthusiastic about alternative dispute mechanisms when they deliver second class justice for women? Read more…

EDITORIAL 1: MODI’S INDIA: LYNCH MOB NATION

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Of all the fanciful descriptors, such as “world’s fastest growing economy,” that Modi and the BJP have bestowed on India in the three years of their rule, the one history is most likely to record during their tenure is “Lynch Mob Nation.” Read more…

EDITORIAL 2: SEDITION NATION

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Cricket has a passionate following in South Asia. All four major countries, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and now Bangladesh have good teams and a strong base. But India-Pakistan rivalry in cricket is in a sphere of its own reflecting no doubt the larger context in which it occurs. Read more…

FORTY TWO YEARS AFTER THE EMERGENCY, INDIA’S DEMOCRACY IS ONCE AGAIN IN DANGER

Prem Shankar Jha

 

As I write, the country is once again remembering the ‘Emergency’ which was imposed upon India by Mrs Indira Gandhi’s government on June 25, 1975 and lifted 21 months later, on March 21, 1977. Those of us who experienced the censorship, the near-shutdown of public debate and the subtle but all-pervasive atmosphere of terror that prevailed during those two years will never forget it. Read more…

LOCAL TRAIN PASSENGERS TURN INTO A MOB TO ATTACK 3 MUSLIM BOYS, ONE KILLED

The Citizen Bureau

 

NEW DELHI: It was to have been a happy occasion. Young Muslim boys, studying at a madarsa in Surat, Gujarat had come home to their village in Haryana for Eid. Three brothers along with a young friend had gone to Delhi for Eid shopping and caught the local train to Ballabgarh, just on the border, where their village Khatoli was. Read more…

‘I WAS SCARED’

Anis Sheikh Babu Mansuri, 25, was working at his tailoring machine at around 9 pm on Sunday, June 18, night after breaking his Ramzan fast when a police jeep pulled up outside his house. A police officer asked him to step outside. Mansuri, wearing only his nightclothes of a tee-shirt and shorts, complied. The police immediately seized him. Read more…

THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS HATEMONGERING IN INDIA

Jeff Kingston

 

The irresistible urge to mix politics and religion usually comes at the expense of secularism, tolerance and vulnerable minorities. Read more…

PEACE NOW AND FOREVER BETWEEN PAKISTAN AND INDIA CAMPAIGN FROM 1ST JULY 2017 TO 15 AUGUST 2017

India and Pakistan have seen too many conflicts and the loss of many valuable lives. Unfortunately, this situation continues as the ruling classes in India and Pakistan are keen on keeping this tension alive to justify spending more and more on defence at the cost of the poor and poverty reduction programmes. Read more…

KOVIND, DALIT POLITICS AND HINDU NATIONALISM

Ram Puniyani

 

By nominating Ramnath Kovind as the Presidential candidate, BJP has tried to play the politics of tokenism to the hilt. Mr. Kovind is a dalit from UP. While many names were doing round from BJP parivar, finally they settled down for a person who is dalit in name and Hindu nationalist in ideology. Read more…

INDIA: 2017 PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL AWARD

New Delhi: The Praful Bidwai Memorial Award for 2017 goes to the Maharashtra-based Andhashradha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS, Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee). Read more…

#NOTINMYNAME PROTESTS: A CONVERGENCE OF POETICS AND POLITICS AT JANTAR MANTAR

Kartik Maini

 

There are many ways to remember a protest. Although fundamentally ephemeral, a protest leaves its assembly with memories, vocabularies, and visions of alternative politics. Read more…

#NOTINMYNAME PROTESTS: THOUSANDS HIT THE STREETS AGAINST MOB LYNCHINGS

Express Web Desk

 

Why I support #NotInMyName: My daughter is Shahana. And I will stand like a wall if that name bothers you. At Jantar Mantar: Not in my name, I came here to break the silence#NotInMyName: Twitterati all across cities post pictures of the protest and express solidarity. Read more…

MESSAGE FROM NOTED DOCUMENTARY FILM DIRECTOR ANAND PATWARDHAN

Nafrat ke Khilaaf Insaaniyat Ki Awaaz ! (Humanity’s Voice Against Hate)

 

Demonstration in Mumbai on 3rd July, 4 pm, Kotwal garden (opposite Plaza cinema, Dadar West) Read more…

On behalf of INSAF Bulletin we strongly endorse the struggle of IIT-Madras students to eat the foods of their choice and strongly condemn the physical attack on them by right-wing Hindutva supporters that led to a severe injury to R. Sooraj. We urge IIT management to expel the attackers and prosecute them to the full extent of the law.

Vinod Mubayi, Raza Mir – Editors, Insaf Bulletin.

EDITORIAL: VIGILANTES AND THE RULE OF LAW IN SOUTH ASIA

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

One of the defining features of authoritarianism, the phase that often precedes Fascism, is the replacement of the rule of the law by the rule of the individual or the dominant group. This feature is often accompanied by the demonization of minority groups, as a means of asserting cultural superiority and deflecting attention from other social problems such as growing inequality and the siphoning of public wealth into private hands. Read more…

KASHMIR: HARD CHOICES ONLY

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

I RECENTLY received an extraordinary email from a troubled young Kashmiri in Srinagar. Days before the Indian authorities turned off the internet, Saif (not his real name) had watched on YouTube the 45-minute video documentary Crossing the Lines — Kashmir, Pakistan, India that I had helped make in 2004 and mostly agreed with its non-partisan narrative. A nationalist boy turned stone thrower, Saif is outraged by the brutality of Indian occupation. He is fortunate, he says. His 14-year-old second cousin lost his left eye to pellets. Read more…

SANSAD HAILS THE FIGHT-BACK AGAINST OPPRESSION OF DALITS 

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, (SANSAD) hails the formation of the Bhim Army in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, as the instrument of fight-back against persistent caste discrimination and the recent spate of violence against Dalits. Read more…

A NATION OF VIGILANTES – LYNCH MOB REPUBLIC

Mukul Kesavan

 

These three years have seen the State fuse with the street to create a vigilante nation. If India’s first national movement was a mobilization against foreign rulers, the new nationalism, the principal style of which is vigilantism, is directed at the enemy within. Read more…

OVER TO THE VIGILANTE

Christophe Jaffrelot

 

Vigilantes hit the headlines every other day in “new India”. But this phenomenon is not that new and exists elsewhere as well. It gained momentum under previous union governments, especially in BJP-ruled states. As a result, the Bajrang Dal’s cultural policing of a “deviant” artist like M.F. Husain forced him to leave the country. Read more…

INDIA: A BLEAK OUTLOOK – THE ROAD TO MOB RULE IN UTTAR PRADESH

Ramachandra Guha

 

In March 1946, a three-man ‘Cabinet Mission’ arrived from England to seek to transfer power from British to Indian hands. They invited Mahatma Gandhi to come from Sevagram to meet them. Gandhi’s old patron and disciple, G.D. Birla, wanted to host him at his capacious house in the heart of New Delhi. But Gandhi decided to stay in the Bhangi (sweepers’) colony instead. Birla now hastened to install electricity and provide fresh water to the humble home which his Master had chosen to grace. Read more…

‘NAXALBARI’: FIFTY YEARS LATER

Pritam Singh

 

Today, May 25, will commemorate 50 years of the Maoist uprising of Naxalbari in West Bengal. In March, 1967, a decision was taken in Naxalbari to carry out an armed rebellion for the rights of peasants and workers. This isolated revolt led to a movement that has lasted half a century. Read more…

A VIGILANTE MOB, A COLLUSIVE STATE

Khaled Ahmed

 

The Pakhtun culture of Pakistan lives under the concept of “tarboor”, the “cousin from the father’s side” who is supposed to kill you one day. What Pakistan and India are doing to their people, while also getting ready to hurt each other, is the disease Freud called “narcissism of the closely related”. Read more…

SUPREME TEST: AADHAAR-RELATED CASES COULD TELL US WHETHER OUR JURISPRUDENCE IS FIT FOR AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

 

It will also be a test case for whether the checks and balances of our constitutional scheme stand, or whether they will get blown away at the slightest whiff of executive power. Read more…

ANCHOR JIHAD IS LIKE WWF, BUT THE DAMAGE IS REAL

Aakar Patel

 

Something unusual happened in America this week. More people watched liberal MSNBC and centrist CNN than they did conservative Fox News. This is unusual because the norm is that the conservative media dominates ratings for news, whether radio or TV. Read more…

BANGLADESH ORDERS STATUE OF WOMAN AT SUPREME COURT PUT BACK UP

Julfikar Ali Manik

 

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Two days after the authorities in Bangladesh gave in to pressure from Islamist groups and ordered the removal of a statue from the country’s Supreme Court, they flip-flopped on Sunday, ordering that the statue be put back up, albeit in a less prominent location. Read more…

LOSING THE PLOT: WHAT BHANGOR FARMERS’ STIR SAYS ABOUT MAMATA’S LAND POLICY

Sulagna Sengupta

 

How the times change. The Trinamool Congress took power on the back of its agitation against the previous Left Front regime’s “atrocities” on farmers. Now, Mamata Banerjee’s party is on the receiving end of the farmers’ anger. Read more…

MUSLIM WOMEN IN INDIA CHALLENGE ‘INSTANT DIVORCE’ LAW

Geeta Anand

 

MUMBAI — When Neeha Khan’s husband entered her parents’ house in eastern Mumbai last February, he carried a letter that contained a word, repeated three times, that can instantly change the course of a Muslim woman’s life in India. Read more…

HOW INDIA IS KILLING THE COUNTRY”S LARGEST ECONOMY OF THE POOR

Richard Mahapatra

 

New restriction on cattle slaughter will severely cripple the livestock economy which is bigger than crop economy; poor farmers shifted to livestock in face of uncertain rain and dwindling income. Read more…

EDITORIAL: RIGHT TURN AHEAD

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The news continues to be bleak for progressive activists the world over, especially in India. Murderous attacks on minorities and the marginalized by savage mobs, calling themselves “gau-rakshaks” (cow protectors) continue unabated. The police, instructed by ruling BJP politicians, look the other way or harass and arrest the victims as happened in the case of the dairy farmer Pehlu Khan, lynched by a Hindutva mob in Alwar, for the “crime” of transporting a milch cow he had legally purchased. Read more…

ETHICS IS THE ANSWER

Anand Patwardhan

 

With fiery orange hidden under a newfound tricolor, Narendra Modi’s rise to power saw a mushrooming of the RSS and affiliates like the ABVP. Pseudo “nationalism” invaded every campus. Read more…

THE CONSPIRACY BEHIND BABRI MOSQUE DEMOLITION

Ram Puniyani

 

After the long wait, the Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Khehar opined that long pending dispute of Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid should be settled out of court. (March 2017) He even offered to mediate himself in the matter. Read more…

DELHI POLICE FAIL TO IDENTIFY MEN WHO BEAT UP BUFFALO TRADERS, BUT BOOK VICTIMS FOR ANIMAL CRUELTY

Abhishek Dey

 

“My friends pleaded for mercy. They kept screaming that they were transporting buffaloes and not cows. All this fell on deaf ears.” Read more…

HOW THE SP AND BSP HELPED ADITYANATH GET AWAY WITH HIS HATE SPEECHES

Shahnawaz Alam

 

If a political figure finds general acceptance as a ‘firebrand’ leader in a country like India, it only reveals the flaws in our democratic system. Read more…

GAINED IN TRANSLATION: LIFE LESSONS FOR MY STUDENTS

Perumal Murugan

 

I am a teacher in a government college, where 90 per cent of my students are first-generation learners. These are students, who during their school days, juggle classroom work with jobs that involve some form of physical labour. Read more…

SINKING VALLEY

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

 

It is an unmistakable sign of the corrosion of Indian democracy that an odd combination of illusions and nauseating bravado is being spun in Delhi around the grim political situation in Kashmir. Read more…

WHERE ARE INDIA’S DISSENTING HINDUS?

Harsh Mander

 

As anti-Muslim rhetoric festers, the Hindu majority continues to fail to raise its voice against the BJP’s toxic politics of hate. Read more…

AN INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN

Vidya Bhushan Rawat

 

For over 40 years Anand Patwardhan’s documentary films have stood for freedom of expression. He faced censorship on numerous occasions, took the government to court, and won each time. Read more…

KANDHAMAL: WHITHER JUSTICE FOR VIOLENCE VICTIMS

Ram Puniyani

 

Book Review: Kandhalmal: Introspection for Initiative for Justice 2007-2015, Vrinda Grover and Saumya Uma, Media House and United Christian Forum, Delhi 2017 Read more…

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT ON ATTACKS ON STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOOLS IN PAKISTAN

Attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups are having a devastating impact on education in Pakistan, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released a day before the Second International Conference on Safe Schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina. … Read more…

I, MIGRANT

Kamila Shamsie

 

One London night, a few weeks after Brexit, something happened as I was walking to a bus stop that had never happened in the 9 years since I’d moved to the UK: a man (white, young, Londoner by his accent) shouted abuse at me and followed up with ‘Go back where you came from’. Read more…

EDITORIAL: UP ELECTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

After the big win in UP and his appointment of Yogi Adityanath as UP Chief Minister, Modi has clearly decided that there is no need any more to sheath the iron fist of Hindutva inside the proverbial velvet glove of “inclusive development” i.e. “sabka saath, sabka vikas.” Rather, he has calculated that the need is to consolidate the vote bank of Hindutva by intensifying the communal agenda. The Yogi’s entire past is testimony to this strategy. His frequent foul-mouthed diatribes and threats of violence against religious minorities, mainly Muslims but also Christians, are known to all. Hence Modi’s embrace of him gives a clear signal not only to the Muslims but also to the “seculars” as well as the Yadavs of the Samajwadi Party and the Dalits who voted for Mayawati. The arson and panicked shutdown of slaughterhouses in the first week of the new regime offers a clear demonstration of the new reality. No doubt Modi and Yogi will keep on mouthing the development for all slogan whenever it suits them to do so. It is a costless exercise aimed at the many Indian “liberals” who continue to justify and valorize Modi as “vikas purush”. Read more…

HISTORY AND NATURE OF THE AYODHYA DISPUTE

Irfan Engineer

 

In a surprise development, the Supreme Court on 21st March 2017 urged the rival parties in the Ram Janamabhoomi – Babri Masjid (RJBM) case to negotiate and resolve the dispute in a spirit of give and take. The Chief Justice of India offered himself to be a mediator should both the parties agreed. The observations came on application of Subramanian Swamy seeking urgent hearing of the appeal against the order of Allahabad High Court dated 30th September 2010 in the RJBM title suit. Subramanian Swamy, a BJP leader, has no locus standi in the case and he is not a party in the Appeal. Yet the Supreme Court exercised its discretion and even asked the BJP leader to talk to all parties to the case and bring them to negotiating table. Read more…

SPINNING THE YOGI – VANGUARD AND FRINGE

Mukul Kesavan

 

The zombification of right-wing publicists in contemporary India is a small but significant part of our intellectual history. When the Bharatiya Janata Party’s turn at the top comes to an end and the bruised republic shuffles back to the centre, historians of this political moment will explain why Right-leaning commentators chose to make a Hindu-supremacist turn seem respectable and how they committed intellectual suicide to join the shambling ranks of the living dead. Read more…

THE YOGI AND THE MAGIC OF NUMBERS

Gopalkrishna Gandhi

 

Will India’s democrats let majoritarianism plant the seeds of counter-democracy? Read more…

CONDEMN CONVICTION AND SENTENCING OF MARUTI WORKERS!

PUDR

 

The Sessions Court in Gurgaon today announced the quantum of sentence for 31 workers convicted by it on 10th March in the State of Haryana Vs. Jiyalal and Others case. Thirteen union leaders have been awarded life imprisonment, four others five years imprisonment and remaining 14 sentence as already undergone. Read more…

A LEAF FROM THE ILLUSTRIOUS LIFE OF THE CM DESIGNATE OF UTTAR PRADESH

Apoorvanand

 

What happened in the eastern Uttar Pradesh town was not a conflict but violence unleashed by MP Yogi Adityanath and his henchmen. Read more…

KANSAS VICTIM WAS INDIAN, BUT THAT’S NOT THE POINT

Jaya Saxena,

 

On the 22nd of February, a white man in Kansas yelled “Get out of my country” before shooting at two Indian men in a bar. He killed one, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and injured Kuchibhotla’s friend, Alok Madasani, as well as bystander Ian Grillot, who tried to intervene. It’s a tragic story that lies at the intersection of violence, immigration, racism, and politics. It also highlights the importance of how we talk about immigrants and victims of color. Read more…

GOD VERSUS GOD

Dr Ayesha Siddiqa

 

Sindh has long shown warning signs of becoming an ideological battleground. Read more…

NO TALKING IN THE HINDU RASHTRA – LESSONS FROM THE DISRUPTIONS AT DELHI’S RAMJAS COLLEGE

Ananya Vajpeyi

 

What does the Hindu Right fear the most? Is it who talks? Or is it what is talked about? Read more…

BANGLADESH: THE BLOOD ON OUR CLOTHES 

Shehzad M Arifeen,

 

Are we ready to pay attention to the workers?

 

As a species, years like 2016 notwithstanding, we have indeed come a long, long way. On January 21, the world witnessed the Women’s March — an awe-inspiring demonstration of women’s resistance and a testament to how far the feminist movement has come. Read more…

THE COMING BAN ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Zia Mian

 

PRINCETON – On March 27, the United Nations will start negotiations on an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons. It will be a milestone marking the beginning of the end of an age of existential peril for humanity. Read more…

PANCHAGAVYA “RESEARCH”: CRITICS ASSAIL INDIA’S ATTEMPT TO ‘VALIDATE’ FOLK REMEDY

Sanjay Kumar

 

According to Hindu tradition, Indian cows are not only sacred—they are also the source of a cure-all for everything from schizophrenia and autism to diabetes and cancer. Read more…

EDITORIAL: GUJARAT 15 YEARS LATER

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The recent victory by the BJP in Maharashtra’s civic polls provides an unfortunate bookend to the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Gujarat pogrom. Maharashtra is of course adjacent to Gujarat, and has had its share of BJP-led assaults on a variety of minority communities, including Dalits and Muslims, but also women, secular activists and those protesting against pro-capitalist policies. Yet, the electoral calculus continues to favor the perpetrators of violence and intimidation. It is perhaps accurate to say that within the mainstream discourse in India, the role played by the BJP and in particular the current Prime Minister of India in the horrific massacre of a decade and a half ago, when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat, has been relegated to the past and is in danger of being forgotten. Read more…

DEMONETISING THE ECONOMY AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS

Gautam Mody

 

In the three hours between the time the Finance Minister completed his budget speech in parliament and the closing of stock markets, the two major stock market indices rose by two percentage points leaving little doubt who the Union Budget Statement 2017-18 (BS) was aimed at. Read more…

INVITATION BY RADICAL DESI (VANCOUVER)

Radical Desi invites everyone to come and join us for a rally in memory of the victims of Samjhauta Express blast that left 68 people dead on February 18, 2007. Most of the victims were Pakistani Muslims. Read more…

DU ON EDGE AFTER ATTACK ON STUDENTS

Delhi University’s North campus has come to resemble a battleground with glass bottles, stones and even lunch packets being hurled at students, as chants of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ ring through the air. Read more…

OUR RESOLVE WILL NOT FALTER, SAYS RAMJAS STUDENT WHO ORGANISED DISRUPTED SEMINAR

Anushka Baruah

 

‘The kind of azaadi we fight for must be clarified: we are looking for the freedom to inquire and innovate.’ Read more…

15 YEARS AFTER THE GUJARAT GENOCIDE – THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE CONTINUES

Dolores Chew

 

The genocide occurred in Gujarat, India, from the end of February 2002 and continued for two weeks. At least 2000 people were killed and many went missing. Many of those displaced during the violence have been unable to return to their former homes. While trials of the accused have gone ahead and sentences have been handed down the key individuals who orchestrated the genocide are still free. But the struggle for justice continues, with women at the forefront. Read more…

SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN’S COMMUNITY CENTRE (SAWCC) STATEMENT ON THE MASS SHOOTINGS IN QUEBEC MOSQUE ON SUNDAY 28TH JANUARY 2017

The South Asian Women’s Community Centre is shocked and stunned by the mass shooting resulting in deaths and serious injuries at a Quebec mosque on Sunday 28th January 2017.  We offer our deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the members of the Islamic Community Centre in Ste-Foy, Quebec. And we stand in solidarity with Muslim-identified Quebecers at this time. Read more…

OPEN FOR ME MY HEART: AN ANTI-RACIST FEMINIST QUEER MUSLIM RESPONSE TO SYSTEMIC XENOPHOBIA

Farha Najah

 

The following speech was spoken on January 30th, 2017 at a Vigil in response to the anti-Muslim murders in Sainte-Foy, Quebec. Read more…

IN PAKISTAN, TOLERANT ISLAMIC VOICES ARE BEING SILENCED

William Dalrymple

 

The Sehwan bombing is a result of the Saudi-funded fundamentalism that has taken a grip in the country Read more…

‘PREPLANNED INHUMAN COLLECTIVE VIOLENT ACT OF TERRORISM’: WHAT MODI GOT AWAY WITH IN THE GODHRA CASE

Manoj Mitta

 

On the 15th anniversary of the Godhra train burning, a recap of little-known anomalies in the case that changed the course of India’s history. Read more…

INDIA: UNION BUDGET 2017-18: INADEQUATE RESPONSE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Arun Kumar

 

The Budget is an instrument of macroeconomic policy first and then anything else. If its aggregate figures are found wanting, its allocations and goals would also not be attained. In times of a shock to the economy, chances that the figures may be incorrect become greater. Assumptions underlying the preparation of the Budget have a high probability of being incorrect. Read more…

BANGLADESH’S CREEPING ISLAMISM

Anis Ahmed

 

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Every year on the first day of school, students across Bangladesh wait eagerly for their new textbooks. Many have few extravagances in their lives, and for them that day is as thrilling as Christmas morning in other countries. Read more…

THE DECLINING LEFT – BANGLADESH EXPECTS MORE

 

Mir Aftabuddin Ahmed

 

Suranjit Sengupta had been a stalwart of the Awami League for the last four decades or so. An articulate parliamentarian and a vociferous constitutionalist, Mr. Sengupta had been a robust voice in favour of socialist principles. Read more…

ROHINGYA INSURGENCY HERALDS WIDER WAR IN MYANMAR

Anthony Davis

 

The Harakah al Yaqin insurgent group, with leadership in Saudi Arabia and ties to Bangladeshi extremist groups, threatens to bring global jihad to Myanmar Read more…

EDITORIAL: GETTING READY FOR A YEAR OF STRUGGLE

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

On January 21, 2017, a day after Donald Trump ascended to the Presidency of the USA, women and men all over the world marched in a display of defiance that provided a spark of optimism in a year that had begun with a relentless barrage of bad news and apprehension for the vulnerable and their champions all over the world. The crowd in Washington DC, estimated at 1 million, easily dwarfed Trump’s stage-managed inaugural parade, and it was estimated that the participants at marches across the world numbered over 5 million. Read more…

2016: A YEAR OF OUTRAGEOUS LIES: FROM ECONOMIC GROWTH TO JOB CREATION TO DEMONETISATION

Mohan Guruswamy

 

On Thursday, I heard the spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party, Sambit Patra, blithely claim that when the National Democratic Alliance government of Atal Behari Vajpayee demitted office in 2004, gross domestic product was growing at 8.4%, and when the United Progressive Alliance regime under Manmohan Singh lost the elections in 2014, this growth was down to 4.8%. He made an attempt to wring some humour out of the reversal of growth figures, which would have been quite neat but for the fact that it is an outright lie. Read more…

ONE PERCENT OF INDIANS OWN 58% OF COUNTRY’S WEALTH: OXFAM INEQUALITY REPORT

Mridula Chari

 

Fifty-seven billionaires in India possess as much wealth as the poorest 70% of the country, according to a report on global inequality released on Monday by Oxfam, an international confederation of 18 non-governmental organisations. Read more…

PAKISTAN: ABDUCTING SOCIAL ACTIVISTS

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

Had last week’s kidnappings of bloggers and social media activists happened in Balochistan, it would have been a non-event. But all five abductions happened in Punjab — and now the authorities are feeling some heat. Read more…

BANGLADESH: CONTROVERSIAL DRAFT LAW ALLOWING CHILD MARRIAGE IN “SPECIAL CASES” IS THE ROAD TO REGRESSION

Elita Karim

 

Very recently, a law drafted by the Ministry for Women and Children’s Affairs stated that if a 16-year-old female gets married with the consent of her parents or the court for justified reasons or under special circumstances, she would not be considered underage or a minor. However, the authorities do not define what they mean by special circumstances. Read more…

INSIDE THE LIFE OF PAKISTAN’S FIRST FEMALE STRING THEORIST

Mahrukh Sarwar

 

Tasneem Zehra Husain, Pakistan’s first female string theorist at the mere age of 26, recently published her new book Only the Longest Threads, which fictionalises major breakthroughs in physics through the minds of the people who lived in those periods of discovery, reports the MIT Technology Review Pakistan. Read more…

WHY BOTH MODI AND TRUMP ARE TEXTBOOK POPULISTS

Amit Varma

 

As Donald Trump raised his tiny paw and took the presidential oath this Friday, I had just finished reading an outstanding book that, I thought, explained Trump as well as many other leaders on the world stage today. In ‘What is Populism?’ Jan-Werner Muller, a Princeton professor, lays out all the ingredients from which you can cook up a populist movement. I was struck by how closely our own prime minister, Narendra Modi, matched Muller’s definition. Consider the following characteristics that characterise populists, as defined by Muller. Read more…

INDIA: LAWLESS ON THE SHORE

Nirupama Subramanian

 

Protests are continuing in Chennai and other parts of Tamil Nadu for a “permanent solution” to the demand that Jallikattu be allowed even after the quick, synchronised surrender of the Centre and the Tamil Nadu government through the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Tamil Nadu Amendment) Ordinance followed by a bill. The permanent solution that the protestors want is the removal of the bull from the list of animals restricted from performing and exhibition in Section 22 of the Act through a constitutional amendment. Read more…

DEMONETIZATION: A FRAUD ON THE PEOPLE

Lokayat

 

[This is a comprehensive, well-formatted report by Lokayat that provides a clear understanding of demonetization and its attendant injustices. The URL for the full report is below, we include the introduction here] Read more…

TEESTA SETALVAD HAS WRITTEN HER MEMOIR, AND IT’S EVERY BIT AS CHILLING AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE

Teesta Setalvad

 

I was born in a family of Gujaratis, of Gujarati lawyers to be precise. Gujarat was always a part of me, though we were proud migrants to Bombay. My great grandfather left his government job in Ahmedabad within four days of taking his post to study law in Bombay. My mother, who was related to my father prior to their marriage, had a paternal uncle in Ahmedabad, who was the Advocate General of Gujarat for twenty-six years. Once or twice a year, we would visit Ma’s mama and mami. Read more…

INTIMIDATION DIRECTED AT BELA BHATIA

Please endorse the statement.

 

We strongly condemn the brazen act of intimidation directed at Bela Bhatia at her house in Parpa village, Jagdalpur. Clearly, this middle of the night attack is aimed at making Bela abandon her human rights work in the area and quit Parpa. Read more…

INSAF wishes its readers a Happy 2017! Hang in there, comrades, the ride may get a bit rougher, but we will have one another!

EDITORIAL: CASHLESS SOCIETY AND CLUELESS PATRIOTISM

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Narendra Modi’s recent acknowledgement that the aim of demonetization is to usher in a “cashless society” is a tacit admission of the fact that the goal is to greatly expand the fledgling financial product industry of credit cards, e-wallets, paytms and more and thus divert more resources from the pockets of the great masses of the poor to add to the fortunes of those atop this sector. For example, in every transaction of Re. 100, the aam aadmi will now have to lose Re. 2.50 or so paid as “transaction” fees to those who issue the plastic cards or their electronic equivalents. Considering that almost 90% of transactions in the Indian economy were carried out in cash, converting even a fraction to cashless forms is guaranteed to generate a bonanza for current and future cronies of Modi who stand to prosper from his risky diktat even as the masses suffer and the economy itself declines in the interim. This upward redistribution of resources, while shedding crocodile tears for the state of the poor, is the hallmark of Modi’s economic policies. Read more…

DEMONETIZATION: THE MOTHER OF ALL DISRUPTIONS

Jean Drèze

 

The tremendous power of the software industry in India may help explain why the disruptive effects of demonetisation are being taken lightly. Read more…

PRESS RELEASE: Kashmir Concerned Citizens’ Collective

SRINAGAR, December 16: The Concerned Citizens’ Collective team that visited Kashmir from 12 to 16 December 2016, expressed deep dismay to observe that the people of the Kashmir valley have been entirely abandoned by their central and state governments, in this time of their great suffering. The only face of government that the people of the Valley encounter is of a repressive security establishment, they declared. Read more…

‘CASHLESS? THAT’S A JOKE’

Bashaarat Masood, Kuwar Singh

 

Lanura, with a population of around 1,500, has only six shops — a chemist and five grocers. None of the shopkeepers has a card machine or has ever used Net banking. Read more…

PAKISTAN: UNION LEADERS LAMENT STRIPPING LABOUR ADVISER OF HIS POWERS

Leaders of trade unions and labour associations lamented on Tuesday that provincial labour adviser Saeed Ghani, on court orders, had been restrained by the government from exercising any executive authority in the affairs of the Sindh Employees’ Social Security Institution (SESSI). Read more…

BANK ‘GANDHIGIRI’, CASHLESS HARA-KIRI IN MARATHWADA

P. Sainath

 

A farmer in Nagur holds up an extract of his loan account from the credit cooperative society; further interest of 2-4 per cent gets added at the level of the societies. Read more…

PROMOTING ANTI-SCIENCE VIA TEXTBOOKS

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

A biology textbook is normally expected to teach biology as science, meaning a scientifically based study of the structure, growth and origin of living things. But what if such a book instead says science must follow ideology and loudly denounces the core principles of biology, condemning these as wrong and irrational? Read more…

FAITH, DISSENT AND EXTREMISM: HOW BANGLADESH IS STRUGGLING TO STAY SECULAR

Samia Huq

 

The recent violent attacks on a Hindu temple in Bangladesh’s Netrokona district, and previous assaults on temples and homes in October in Brahmanbaria are a troubling illustration of Bangladesh’s struggle to protect two of its fundamental values: secularism and pluralism. Read more…

NEPAL: A COSTLY CONSTITUTION

Anurag Acharya

 

Crucial issues ignored in the debate over the constitution will create faultlines in Nepali politics once it’s passed. Read more…

PAKISTAN’S SECTARIAN CONUNDRUM

Umar Riaz

 

Samuel P. Huntington in his celebrated theory of the Clash of Civilisations declared in 1996 that the Islamic Civilisation has bloody borders and ‘bloody innards’. Sectarianism embodies those bloody innards within the body of Islam. Almost all current religious schools of thought and denominations are universal in theory and sectarian in practice. They might be exclusive or inclusive, but there is none which is not distinctive or not possessive of its group identity. In our country, the sectarian fault lines are too deep, fissures too vast and consensus on exclusion too solid. These sectarian faiths have political, social and violent capital at their disposal and they wield all three, or any one, depending upon the situation. Read more…

REAL CAPITALISM: TURBULENT AND ANTAGONISTIC, BUT NOT IMPERFECT

Michael Roberts

 

A review of Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016), £35.99 Read more…

EDITORIAL: FAREWELL COMRADE CASTRO

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

By any measure relevant to a decent future for the world, November 2016 has been an extremely depressing month. In the United States, con-man Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, despite having lost the popular vote by over 2 million votes. Right-wingers across the world, including some in the Indian diaspora, are jubilant. Get ready for four years of unrelenting assaults on reproductive rights, minority rights, police brutality, health care and the reduction of public spending in the service of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. Read more…

TALLER THAN THE REST

Saeed Naqvi

 

An interview with Castro was a memorable experience on an epic scale.

 

AN itinerant journalist does in the course of his wanderings pick up an icon or two whom he values above others. Had I been old enough to have met Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, they too would be at the top of the list. Read more…

ARUNA ROY AND THE GRASSROOTS REVOLUTION IN INDIA

Jooneed Khan

 

In the “multiple Indias” where firebrand social activist Aruna Roy has earned herself a world-wide repu-tation for integrity and commitment, women of all castes, classes and creeds come together more easily than anyone else in the struggle for rights, justice and for constant deepening of democracy. Read more…

INDIA’S CRACKDOWN IN KASHMIR: IS THIS THE WORLD’S FIRST MASS BLINDING?

Mirza Waheed

 

A bloody summer of protest in Kashmir has been met with a ruthless response from Indian security forces, who fired hundreds of thousands of metal pellets into crowds of civilians, leaving hundreds blinded. Read more…

MONTREAL WOMEN RESIST OCCUPATION, MILITARIZATION AND WARS OF AGGRESSION

Women from diverse communities marched through downtown Montreal on Saturday 26 November, after hearing messages that brought life to global and local conflicts and the resistance of women here and around the world to protect the land, water, the air and our futures! Read more…

TARGETING NANDINI SUNDAR (VARIOUS NEWS STORIES)

Murder Charge Is Absurd, Top Cop’s Attempt To Harass Us: DU Professor Sundar

Hindustan Times 8 November 2016.

 

Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar, who has been booked along with Maoists on charges of murder of a tribal villager in insurgency-hit Sukma district, said on Tuesday the FIR against her was “patently absurd”. Read more…

DEMONETISATION: RURAL INDIA HIT HARD, FARMERS SKIP SEASON, NO WORK FOR DAILY WAGERS IN ORISSA

Basudev Mahapatra

 

BHUBANESHWAR: With the sowing season for the winter (Ravi) crop in full swing, Nabarathi Kuanr, 60, of Sudrukumpa village of Kandhamal district in Odisha has no option but to skip a cropping season as he is unable to get seeds and fertilisers from the government and the cooperatives because of the scarcity of lower denomination notes after the Indian government on November 8 declared that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes have been demonetized. Read more…

PRESS STATEMENT BY FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT OF INDIA

Free Software Movement of India (fsmi.in)

 

INDIA: DANGEROUS ORDER BY DISTRICT MAGISTRATE OF INDORE BANNING ANY CRITICISM ON SOCIAL MEDIA OF DE-MONETISATION BY GOVT. OF INDIA – PRESS STATEMENT BY FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT OF INDIA Read more…

DEMONETISATION: THE POOR DON’T MATTER EXCEPT TO BUY VOTES

Pratap Antony

 

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. Leonard Cohen. Read more…

DEATH BY DEMONETISATION

Satya Sagar

 

The abrupt demonetisation of 500 and 1000 rupee notes by the Narendra Modi regime is a drastic move that is staggering in its scale, ambition and repurcussions. The only other figures in modern history one can think of, devious or stupid enough to attempt something similar, are the likes of Marcos, Suharto, Idi Amin and Pol Pot. Read more…

THE CHIEF OF COUNTERFEIT GRIEF

Apoorvanand

 

“We hear that governance now will have a different cadence

Tyranny will now be the protector

Cities will be without walls or doors

The sky will tremble with counterfeit grief

Executioners will be in charge of funerals,

Killers will organise mourning

Orphans and widows will find their hands and feet bound

The heads of the faith will be held aloft on spears.

If this be the realisation of India’s ancient dreams

Then soon, there will be no India, nor any of its connoisseurs.” Read more…

A COUNTRY FILLED WITH ANTI NATIONALS!

K P Sasi

 

I thought the Muslims were the only anti nationals in this country. But I was mistaken. Earlier, thousands of people including even women and children who were questioning Koodankulam nuclear plant were declared as anti nationals. They are not the only ones outside the community of Muslims. Read more…

PAKISTAN: THE ESTABLISHMENT’S DILEMMA

Pervez Hoodbhoy

 

THE oligarchy which runs Pakistan, often called the establishment, is in a quandary. The problem is that whatever it says through its diplomats abroad — and with however much energy — the world insists on perceiving Pakistan as an ideological state wedded to exporting jihad. This is undesirable, but so also is the idea of changing course. Read more…

BANGLADESH: THE SOUNDS OF MADNESS

Iffat Nawaz

 

There is no escaping it — the world is increasingly being divided by hatred

 

How fast does sound travel? Certainly not as fast as light. Under the bright sun, all sounds seem to dissolve into light, no residues, no gripes. But what about at night? Read more…

EDITORIAL: CULTURE POLITICS GETS UGLY

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

We begin by wishing our readers a Happy Deepavali. This festival is celebrated all over South Asia by lighting lamps, but this Deepavali, we remember Faiz’s forlorn poem Raushniyon ke Shehr (The City of Lights), where he articulates his worries about the prospect for peace:

 

Khair ho teri lailaon ki, in sab se keh do

Aaj ki shab jab diye jalaayen, oonchi rakhen lau

 

[May your nights remain safe, do tell them

When they light lamps tonight, keep the wicks high] Read more…

‘YOU ARE A REAL MAN’: AN INDIAN EDITOR’S AWKWARD INTERVIEW WITH DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump seems to inspire weird reactions and awkwardness just about everywhere he goes. Saturday’s rally for the American presidential candidate in New Jersey, organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition, lived up to this promise, mixing Prabhu Deva and Anupam Kher with dancing light-saber wielding terrorists. And then Trump said, “I love Hindu.” Read more…

IS THE MISUSE OF RELIGION TAINTING INDIA’S ELECTORAL PROCESS?

Teesta Setalvad

 

The Supreme Court will, on Tuesday, October 18 begin final hearing on a batch of petitions that could, potentially have far reaching consequences on the purity of the electoral process and the interpretation of the Indian Constitution. Read more…

FAR FROM BEING ANTI-NATIONAL, IT IS A PATRIOTIC DUTY TO QUESTION THE MILITARY

Saikat Datta

 

On March 16, 1968, US Army soldiers from the Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division dropped in on two villages in South Vietnam, known as My Lai and My Khe. In the subsequent few hours, these soldiers of Charlie Company would go on to kill over 500 villagers – men, women, children and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Read more…

DON’T STOP THE MUSIC: SHARING CULTURE HUMANISES INDIA AND PAKISTAN — BANNING THIS PUSHES BOTH FROM PEACE TOWARDS WAR

Salman Ahmad

 

Despite the trauma of Partition, our history of conflict and the pain of the present moment, there still remains, miraculously, great love, friendship and deep spiritual harmony between Indians and Pakistanis. Read more…

A NEO-PATRIOTIC MOB IN INDIA

Salil Tripathi

 

In 1959, a Pakistani film-maker called Akhtar Kardar directed a film called Jago Hua Savera (The Day Shall Dawn), which brought together creative film-making talent across the Indian subcontinent the way it used to before Independence in 1947, and which is now fast becoming unimaginable. Read more…

HOW THE MEDIA IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN CREATED A WAR WHERE THERE WASN’T ONE

Haroon Khalid

 

At a time when Indians and Pakistanis – politicians, sportsmen, entertainers, media persons and regular civilians – are hurling abuses at each other, it probably renders me unpatriotic to say that Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru is one of my favorite books. Read more…

PATIALA COURT ACQUITS KOBAD GANDHY OF ALL CHARGES

Manish Sirhindi

 

The court of Additional Sessions and District Judge Mohammad Gulzar on Tuesday acquitted Kobad Ghandy, an alleged leader of banned CPI (Maoist), of all charges in a six-year-old case. He was booked by police in 2010 for delivering two “anti-national” speeches at Punjabi University. Read more…

A FILM CANCELLED, A TV INTERVIEW CANNED: COMPETITIVE NATIONALISM IS ERODING FREE EXPRESSION IN INDIA

Girish Shahane

 

As soon as I read that a previously obscure NGO was protesting the screening of a Pakistani film titled Jago Hua Savera at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, I knew the organisers would drop it from the schedule without a whimper. The festival is sponsored by Reliance Jio, never a firm associated with support of free expression, and one increasingly tied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda. Read more…

BANGLADESH: VIOLENCE IS A CULTURE NOW

Fardin Hasin

 

The hacking of Khadiza is not an isolated incident

 

Our society has a morbid fascination with violence Read more…

SRI LANKA: WHEN THE COURTS ARE SILENT…

Shashik Dhanushka and Andi Schubert

 

The injunction order handed down against the public screening of Prasanna Vithanage’s latest movie Silence in the Courts has opened up space to question the function of Justice in Sri Lanka. The movie is said to  be based on a true story about a Magistrate suspected of sexually abusing a woman as a favour for releasing her husband from remand custody. Read more…

INDIA: LETTER BY CONCERNED ACADEMICS TO THE VICE CHANCELLOR, CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF HARYANA, PROTESTING THE ATTACKS ON TEACHERS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE PLAY ’DRAUPADI’

To the Vice Chancellor,

Central University of Haryana Read more…

HINDU REPUBLIC: INDIA IS BEING RECREATED INTO A MAJORITARIAN STATE

Samar Halarnkar

 

“Humko iska badla chahiye and aur hum iska badla le kar rahenge. Hinduon ne chudiyan nahi pahan rakhi hain. In mullon ko jad se ukhaad phenke ge hum…We want revenge and we will achieve this vengeance. Hindus have not worn bangles. We will uproot these mullahs (Muslims) from the roots and throw them away.” Read more…

EDITORIAL: INDIA-PAKISTAN TENSIONS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE LEFT

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

All it took was four heavily armed terrorists. The rest of the script played out like an old tired farce. Seventeen Indian army personnel were killed. In light of the ongoing unrest in the Kashmir Valley, the dogs of war strained to be let out. Irresponsible statements by certain motivated politicians and the leisure class demanded war. Read more…

TO MAKE SENSE OF URI, INDIA MUST UNDERSTAND COURAGE, COWARDICE – AND ITS OWN BORDERS

Girish Shahane

 

On reading about the assault on the Army base in Uri, I thought of Ashwatthamma sneaking into the enemy camp under cover of darkness, setting tents alight, burning to death a generation of Pandava princes. Read more…

INDIA – PAKISTAN TENSIONS: JOINT STATEMENT BY PAKISTAN – INDIA PEOPLES’ FORUM FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY

PIPFPD expresses its concern over the growing tensions between India and Pakistan following militants’ attack on strategically important army base in Uri, Jammu & Kashmir. The leadership of both the countries needs to urgently act towards defusing the tense scenario rather than fuelling it. Read more…

CANADA: DEPLORE THE SILENCING OF JOURNALISTS

SANSAD strongly deplores the ongoing effort to censor journalists critical of the policies of the Indian government and to manipulate the media addressing the South Asian diaspora in Vancouver, BC. Read more…

BANGLADESH: THE PRICE OF FREE SPEECH

Ahsan Akbar

 

In February this year the authorities in Bangladesh took Shamsuzzoha Manik, a 73-year-old publisher, into custody for publishing a book titled “Islam Bitorko” (“Debate on Islam”). Read more…

SRI LANKA: TRAVAILS OF A WAR-TORN PEOPLE

Ahilan Kadirgamar

 

The Northern Provincial Council, which came to power three years ago, has been an abysmal failure. And Colombo has descended to business as usual. Read more…

INDIA – PAKISTAN TENSIONS: OUR PRESENT AND TERRIFYING DANGER

Darryl D’Monte

 

With the tension between India-Pakistan rising, Darryl D’Monte reports a recent discussion about the confrontation between these two nuclear states. Read more…

INDIA: A POOR JOB WITH SUMS – A CASE FOR DOUBLING THE OFFICIAL POVERTY LINE

Prabhat Patnaik

 

An important demand of the trade unions which had called for an all-India general strike on September 2 was that the minimum wage of unskilled workers should be raised to Rs 692 per day. Read more…

INDIA: ONLY THE CONSTITUTION – MUSLIM WOMEN MUST COUNT ON ITS GUARANTEES, NOT READINGS OF RELIGION 

Razia Patel

 

Syeda Hameed has written an article titled ‘Just keep the faith’ (IE, August 30) regarding the Mumbai High Court’s judgement allowing the entry of women into the Haji Ali dargah. Read more…

NEPAL: LETTING NEPAL BE

Kanak Mani Dixit

 

It should be in India’s interest to leave Nepal free to sort out its own challenges. New Delhi should consider the need for economic growth in U.P. and Bihar when it sits down to strategise on Nepal. Read more…

THE RETURN OF SANSKRIT – HOW AN OLD LANGUAGE GOT CAUGHT UP IN INDIA’S NEW CULTURE WARS

Ananya Vajpeyi

 

Indian scholar Ananya Vajpeyi examines the way the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is using Sanskrit to advance a Hindu supremacist agenda. She argues that academics need to step out of the ivory tower and resist the government’s manipulation of this ancient language. Read more…

DOES THE LEFT HAVE A FUTURE?

John Harris

 

There is more than one spectre haunting modern Europe: terrorism, the revival of the far right, the instability of Turkey, the fracturing of the EU project. And in mainstream politics, all across the continent, the traditional parties of the left are in crisis. Read more…

EDITORIAL

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Two discourses, both violent and toxic, have dominated the political scene in India recently. One is the topic of nationalism that has become a source of a vicious, undemocratic campaign directed against anyone who raises a voice against the RSS version of Indian nationalism that can be summarized by the slogan “Mera Bharat mahan (My India – great!). The latest victim of this campaign is the respected human-rights organization Amnesty International, which has been accused of sedition in a lawsuit filed in a court in Bangalore simply because Amnesty sponsored a meeting on Kashmir in which victims of violence by the Army and police recounted their stories. (A letter by Civil Society Organizations reproduced below addresses this issue). Read more…

PEOPLE OF INDIA HAVE LET DOWN IROM SHARMILA

Harsh Mander

 

As she licked honey from a fingertip, she could not hold back her tears. It was the first time in 16 years that any food or water had entered Irom Sharmila’s mouth. This tiny dab of honey ended the most extraordinary non-violent battle against injustice that India has seen in the last half-century. Read more…

MAHASWETA DEVI 1926-2016

Premankur Biswas

 

Hathighisa in Naxalbari is about 560 km from the south Kolkata nursing home where author and activist Mahasweta Devi spent her last few months. Yet, the Magsaysay award winner and Padma Vibhushan, who died on Thursday, is almost a local deity in the seat of the Naxalbari movement of the 1960s. Read more…

IN MAHASWETA DEVI’S FICTION, THE DISPOSSESSED TOLD THEIR OWN TRUTHS

Naveen Kishore

 

“A billion moons pass. A billion lunar years. Opening her eyes after a million light years, Draupadi, strangely enough, sees sky and moon. Slowly the bloodied nailheads shift from her brain. Trying to move, she feels her arms and legs still tied to four posts. Something sticky under her ass and waist. Her own blood. Only the gag has been removed. Incredible thirst. In case she says ‘water’ she catches her lower lip in her teeth. She senses that her vagina is bleeding. How many came to make her?” Read more…

KANDHAMAL: LONG WAIT FOR JUSTICE

Ram Puniyani

 

Today, nearly a decade later when we remember with pain the horrific violence of Kandhamal in 2008, many issues related to the state of affairs of communal violence, state of minorities, the state of justice delivery system come to one’s mind. Read more…

PRESS STATEMENT BY ALL INDIA SECULAR FORUM

All India Secular Forum extends solidarity with the Aazadi Kooch, a Pad Yatra organised by the Una Dalit Atyachar Ladat Samiti which started on 5th August 2016 and goes on till 15th August 2016. The yatra began in Ahmedabad on the 5th and is expected to complete 400 kms when it reaches Una on the 15th. Read more…

KASHMIR, AND THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

Basharat Peer

 

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — On July 8, Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old rebel, was shot dead by Indian soldiers and police officers in a small village in the central part of Indian-controlled Kashmir. News of his killing spread as fast as the bullets that had hit him. Cellphones, emails, social media went wild: “They’ve killed Burhan! They’ve killed Burhan!” Everybody called Burhan by his first name. Read more…

INDIA’S TOP 1% OWNS MORE THAN 50% OF HER WEALTH

Bodapati Srujana

 

NEW DELHI: Today, wealth inequality in India is much sharper than ever before. The top 1% that owned a little more than a third of India’s wealth in 2000, now own more than half the wealth in the country. In this same period, the share of 99% of India’s population went down from almost two-third to less than half. Read more…

‘FOR BJP, THE COW IS A ‘SACRIFICIAL LAMB’ TO POLARISE VOTERS’

Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta

 

The former IPS officer is now part of the Dalit movement in Gujarat. In an interview he discusses the BJP’s implicit support of gau rakshaks, the condition of Dalits in India and where the Una movement is heading. Read more…

CASTE CAPITALISM IN PAKISTAN

Foqia Sadiq Khan

 

How the textiles sector in Pakistan came into the hands of Memons and Chiniotis after the Partition. Read more…

SRI LANKA: 10 YEARS SINCE AID WORKER MASSACRE

Human Rights Watch

 

Sri Lankan authorities have not brought to justice those responsible for the execution-style slaying of 17 aid workers a decade ago this week, Human Right Watch said today. On August 4, 2006, gunmen murdered local staff members from the Paris-based Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger, ACF) at their compound in the town of Muttur, in eastern Trincomalee district. Read more…

BANGLADESH: BAULS UNDER ATTACK

Editorial: The Independent

 

By attacking these mystics minstrels, the militants have not only attacked the pluralistic foundation of our country but have also shamelessly shown their contempt for our culture and customs. Read more…

BANGLADESH: FALSE NUCLEAR HOPE

M V Ramana and Zia Mian

 

Plans to construct Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant are moving forward fast. Read more…

FAST BREEDER REACTORS AND THE SLOW PROGRESS OF INDIA’S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME

M.V. Ramana

 

Breeder reactors have always underpinned the claims of India’s Department of Atomic Energy about generating large quantities of electricity. Read more…

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, INDIA

Dear Friends,

 

As you have no doubt been following in the news, there is a concerted campaign against Amnesty International India (AII) by the ABVP and some sections of the government after the filing of the FIR on charges of sedition against them by Bangalore police, following their event on Kashmir there. Read more…

EDITORIAL: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN PAKISTAN, INDIA, BANGLADESH: SOUTH ASIA’S SHAMEFUL LEGACY

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

On July 15th, Qandeel Baloch, a popular social media celebrity in Pakistan was brutally murdered by her own brother in a horrific case of honor killing. According to the newspaper Dawn, in an unprecedented move by the state, the FIR registered against the killers under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) made the offence unpardonable. Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, was killed by her brother last week because she brought “dishonor” to the family. Physicist and rights activist (and member of the Insaf Bulletin collective) Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy who found Baloch a fearless young woman determined to “break taboos that shackle women in Pakistan’s patriarchal society”, believed she paid the ultimate price for her convictions — being strangled to death. Read more…

VALLEY VOICES IN KOLKATA – “WE AS KASHMIRIS REQUEST YOU”

Dolores Chew

 

On the night of 23 February 1991, soldiers of the 4 Rajputana Rifles of the Indian Army cordoned off the two villages Kunan and Poshpora in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district during a ‘crackdown’.  They took the men away and held them in barns and then gang-raped the women. Read more…

AZADI: WHAT EXACTLY DOES AZADI MEAN TO KASHMIRIS? WHY CAN’T IT BE DISCUSSED? SINCE WHEN HAVE MAPS BEEN SACROSANCT?

Arundhati Roy

 

The people of Kashmir have made it clear once again, as they have done year upon year, decade upon decade, grave upon grave, that what they want is azadi. (The “people”, by the way, does not mean those who win elections conducted in the rifle sights of the army. It does not mean leaders who have to hide in their homes and not venture out in times like these.) Read more…

THE DISHONOURABLE KILLING OF QANDEEL BALOCH

Moni Mohsin

 

Qandeel Baloch, who was murdered last week by her brother, was Pakistan’s first genuine social media star. Despite her fame – she had over 1 million followers on Facebook – 26-year-old Baloch was an unlikely star. Still less did she have the makings of the political and social icon that she has rapidly become in the four days since her death. Read more…

CALIFORNIA PASSES TEXTBOOK STANDARDS INCLUDING ‘COMFORT WOMEN,’ SIKHS

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

 

California’s State Board of Education approved a new History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools Thursday, adding changes on a wide variety of topics, including “comfort women” in World War II, the Bataan Death March and the Battle of Manila, discrimination faced by Sikh Americans, and the roles of LGBTQ community in U.S. and California history, according to the California Department of Education. Read more…

POLICE, POWER, PATRIARCHY

Rahul Srivastav , Manini Srivastav

 

In two separate cases in different districts of Uttar Pradesh, sub-inspector (SI) rank officers were suspended after videos of their abusive behaviour with female complainants went viral on social media. One was a station officer (SO) and the other in- charge of an outpost. In one case, the officer on reaching the spot, after getting a call from Dial100, hurled abuses at the female complainant: “Kya 100 no tere baap ka hai?(Does 100 number belong to your father?”. Read more…

INDIA OUTRAGE AFTER GANG RAPE VICTIM ASSAULTED AGAIN ‘BY SAME MEN’

Geeta Pandey

 

There has been outrage in India after a student was allegedly gang-raped by five men who had also raped her three years ago. Read more…

‘A MODEST PROPOSAL’ IS A BETTER IDEA FOR KASHMIR

Sadanand Menon

 

Almost 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift made ‘a modest proposal’ to the British nation. Erroneously remembered today as a writer of tales for children, Swift was in fact a fierce political satirist and fabulist, with a touch of misanthropy. Himself an Irishman, he proposed that allowing thousands of Irish children to die of malnutrition and starvation due to prolonged conditions of famine induced by the feudal system and British taxation, made for silly economics and a waste of resources. Read more…

COUP D’ÉTAT ATTEMPT: TURKEY’S REICHSTAG FIRE?

Aye Kadiolu

 

On the evening of July 15, 2016, a friend called around 10:30pm and said that both bridges connecting the Asian and European sides of Istanbul were closed by military barricades. Moreover, military jets were flying over Ankara skies. As someone living on the European side of Istanbul and commuting to the Asian side to my university on a daily basis and spending many hours in traffic in order to do that, I immediately knew that the closure of both bridges was a sign of something very extraordinary taking place. Read more…

DHAKA TERROR ATTACK: BANGLADESH PAYS THE PRICE FOR ITS GOVERNMENT’S POLICY OF APPEASING ISLAMISTS

Ikhtisad Ahmed

 

At 8.45 pm on July 1, the last Friday before Eid ul Fitr, an Islamist attack broke out in Gulshan, the diplomatic, expatriate and upper-class heartland of Dhaka. It developed into a hostage situation, with the assailants exchanging gunfire with the police. Two of the first responders were fatally wounded, and many others injured and hospitalised. Rumours abound on social media as shocked and distressed citizens gave in to voyeurism, but ten hours into the attack, neither the Bangladesh prime minister nor her ministers had addressed the nation. Their deafening silence echoed the tepid response of the Awami League government to rising terrorism. Read more…

1,528 FAKE ENCOUNTERS IN MANIPUR ALONE: WHY THE SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT ON AFSPA MATTERS

Saikat Datta

 

On the day the 19th battalion of the Army’s Rashtriya Rifles gunned down Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani in an encounter in South Kashmir, which led to massive protests in which at least 15 people have been killed, came an interim judgment of the Supreme Court that can have a profound impact on human rights in India’s numerous conflict zones. Read more…

ATROCITIES, DISCRIMINATION LED TO DALIT WAVE OF ANGER IN GUJARAT: MARTIN MACWAN

Vidya Venkat

 

“Gujarat has a mere 2.33 per cent of India’s Dalit population, but when it comes to atrocities, it ranks in the top half of the country”. Read more…

IN DEDICATION TO AMJAD SABRI & ALL QAWWALS

Jooneed J Khan

 

Qawwalis can be deadly. Case in point: the assassination of Pakistani Qawwal Amjad Sabri, brought down June 22 in a hail of bullets fired by two gunmen on a motor-bike as he drove with a friend in the ultra-violent city of Karachi. Read more…

MODI’S US TRIP – PERKS OF POWER AND COMPULSIONS OF EMPIRE 

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Modi’s recent trip to the White House and the many embraces he received from President Obama as well as the US Congress reminds us again of the nexus between empire and power. Hardly two years ago, Modi was a pariah in the eyes of the US Government that had refused to grant him a visa for nine long years on the grounds of violation of religious freedom. This denial was based on the pogrom of minority Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 when Modi was Chief Minister and directly in-charge of the police and the law and order machinery. The weakness of the Indian judicial system, which has rarely brought to justice anyone other than mere foot soldiers, in cases of communal violence, is well known. Despite mountains of evidence against Modi, amply documented in many reports, books, and proceedings, various official organs in India chose to issue “clean chits” to him on grounds that would strain the credulity of any impartial observer. However, the US State Department certainly recognized this reality when it opted to deny Modi a diplomatic A-2 visa in 2005 and continued to do so thereafter. Read more…

INDIA’S PATENT PROBLEMS: MODI AND THE END OF CHEAP MEDICINES

Sarah Asrar and Fran Quigley

 

When is a decision on a patent application not a decision at all? When it runs counter to the powerful commercial and diplomatic forces that protect massively profitable pharmaceutical monopolies. Or at least that is what many advocates for access to medicines are saying is the reason behind Indian patent officials last month reversing their own 2015 decision that denied United States-based Gilead Sciences a patent on its hepatitis C treatment sofosbuvir, commonly marketed as Sovaldi. The new decision holds that Sovaldi meets the Indian patenting requirements of novelty and inventiveness. But the earlier decision by the same agency came to the opposite conclusion, holding that Gilead’s drug was not a significant improvement over an already available compound. Read more…

RESIST MODI REGIME’S ASSAULT ON STUDENTS THROUGH SUBRAMANIAM PANEL REPORT ON STUDENT POLITICS

Shehla Rashid

 

The recent government constituted panel‘s (headed by former cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramaniam) report on student politics is unconstitutional, highly regressive and politically motivated, and signals the upcoming onslaught of total commercialisation of education and imposition of Hindutva ideology in universities. The TSR Subramaniam Panel’s report is the logical follow up to the Birla Ambani report (which was submitted in 2000), following which student unions across the country were banned. The Birla Ambani report had lamented that student unions are not allowing commercialisation of education: we accept the charge and take pride in it! We believe that education should be a right of everyone, not a privilege of a handful of people. Read more…

NSG MEMBERSHIP PUSH “ILL-ADVISED, UNWARRANTED”: SRINIVASAN

The Padma Bhushan awardee said failure to get in NSG would not have adverse impact on India’s nuclear programme. Read more…

FIRST PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL AWARD GOES TO PEOPLE’S ARCHIVE OF RURAL INDIA (PARI)

Press Release

 

New Delhi, June 23: The first Praful Bidwai Memorial Award has gone to the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), which was set up in 2014 by noted Mumbai-based journalist and commentator, Palagummi Sainath. Read more…

INDIA: TWO YEARS OF HINDUTVA RULE

Mukul Dube

 

According to a report in the Hindu newspaper of 12 June 2016, Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson Abhay Vartak said that he is “sad to see that Hindu organizations [are] being targeted in spite of a Hindu government being in power”. He forgot that the law has no religion and that the law is above the government in power. A man who kills another human being is a murderer, plain and simple, and he is liable to the same punishment regardless of his religion. Most important, the Constitution of India requires the government of India to have no religion. Read more…

GULBARG SOCIETY CARNAGE: WHO CAST THE FIRST STONE?

Ram Puniyani

 

Communal violence is the big bane of Indian society. While on one hand the innocents are killed the guilty mostly get away without any punishment. The rate of prosecution of riot cases is very low. Even where punishments are meted out the big fish are let off while the foot soldiers get punished. Apart from these observations what is popularized and what has become part of the ‘social common sense’ is that ‘it is Muslims who begin the riot and then they get killed’. Read more…

FACT-FINDING REPORT ON THE ALLEGED EXODUS OF HINDUS FROM KAIRANA

A team of journalists and activists, deputed by The Milli Gazette, on 14 June 2016 visited the town of Kairana in Western Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district which is in the national news due to the claim by the local BJP member of Parliament Hukum Singh that 346 Hindu families have been forced to flee Kairana town due to threats from the Muslim community. This claim aroused much media and political interest and focused lights on the law-and-order situation in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Read more…

PROF MAHESH GURU WALKS FREE TO FACE SUSPENSION FROM MYSORE UNIVERSITY

(SabrangIndia website)

 

Is Criticizing Prime Minister Modi Now A Crime?

 

B.P. Mahesh Chandra Guru walked out of the jail late on the evening of June 24 after getting bail only to receive a suspension order from the Mysore University administration that cities his ‘criticism of Prime Minister of India, HRD Minister and Vice Chancellor in foul and derogatory language” as the reasons for the action against him.  Inquiries made by SabrangIndia reveal that this is the matter before a judicial enquiry that is pending. Read more…

PROTEST THE ONSLAUGHT ON DEMOCRACY!

Call for a People’s Convention, 25 June 2016

 

25 June 1975 is marked as a day of shame, a blot on the history of independent India – the day when democracy was formally suspended through the imposition of the emergency. Today, more than four decades later, the nightmare is playing out again. We are now faced with the stark reality of achhe din, saffron style: an upgraded, corporate friendly, tech savvy version of the Emergency, packaged as a Hindutva dream. Read more…

EDITORIAL: SOUTH ASIA AND FASCISM: DESCENDING FAST, DESCENDING SLOW

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Two issues in South Asia have captured our attention this month. The first is the troubling regularity with which secularist bloggers and journalists are being murdered in Bangladesh. Several secularists including a professor were hacked to death by machete wielding goons in the months of April and May in a depressing “signature” modus operandi, along with a Christian doctor and a Hindu tailor. Likewise, the murder of secular anti-Shiaphobia activist Khurram Zaki in Pakistan in early May unfortunately echoes a similar incendiary mix of intolerance and impunity practiced by fascist goons pretending to be defenders off religiosity. The execution of Motiur Rahman Nizami head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, by the Bangladesh state, is also an unfortunate development. Unsavory and murderous, he may have been, but a principled opposition to the death penalty, even for convicted murderers, should be our position as human rights activists. Read more…

BANGLADESH’S SLOW CAPITULATION TO ISLAMISM

Ikhtisad Ahmed

 

On April 25, Islamists butchered LGBTQ activists Xulhaz Mannan and Tonoy Mahbub in the presence of Xulhaz’s mother at Mannan’s home in Dhaka, for being “the pioneers of practicing and promoting homosexuality in Bangladesh (sic)”. Two days before that, extremists hacked to death Rezaul Karim Siddique, a Muslim professor of English at Rajshahi University in northwest Bangladesh. His killers accused him of “calling to atheism”. Read more…

HAS BANGLADESH FINALLY BURIED THE GHOSTS OF 1971 WAR CRIMES ALONG WITH MOTIUR RAHMAN NIZAMI?

David Bergman

 

The beneficiary and then the victim of Bangladesh’s startling political turnarounds was hanged on May 11. Read more…

BANGLADESH: FASCISM FROM BELOW

Habib Khondker

 

A simple equation differentiates democracies from authoritarian systems. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, it can be said that, in a democracy, the government is fearful of the people, and in an authoritarian system, the people are scared of the government. Read more…

ASSAM GOES SAFFRON: FOUR INGREDIENTS THAT THE BJP GOT RIGHT IN THIS CAMPAIGN

Ipsita Chakravarty

 

This will go down as one of the big success stories in the annals of Indian election history. After 15 years of Congress rule, Assam voted decisively for the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP has gone from five seats in the assembly polls of 2011 to around 60 in 2016. Mission 64 is in the bag and the BJP alliance looks set to notch up more than 80 seats in the 126-member Assembly. Anti-incumbency does not adequately explain such a dramatic verdict. This was a campaign where the BJP got the ingredients just right. Read more…

INDIA: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY IN NAGALAND

Dolly Kikon

 

Perpetrators of sexual violence escape justice, while their victims are trapped between exhortations by women’s advocacy groups not to ‘suffer quietly’ and the social stigma attached to sexual violence. Read more…

THE ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS DECODED: BEHIND THE PROPAGANDA, THE COLD, HARD FACTS

The Citizen Bureau

 

NEW DELHI: The bombast is over, at least one hopes it is. And now that the television media channels are almost over with their customary ‘rah rah BJP’, the cold, sober, hard facts that have emerged from the five Assembly elections should prevail. Read more…

“WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING IN RECENT TIMES COULD WELL DEVELOP INTO FASCISM”: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROMILA THAPAR

The Caravan

 

For over five decades, the historian Romila Thapar has been at the vanguard of research and writing about ancient India. The author of 20 books including seminal titles such as A History of India and Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Thapar is also the author of history textbooks for the National Council for Research and Education (NCERT), used widely in schools across the nation. Read more…

INDIA SLIDING TOWARDS FASCISM UNDER HINDUTVA

Indian Writer, Feminist and Social Activist Noor Zaheer in Montreal, Canada. Read more…

LOOKING BEYOND THE KOMAGATA MARU APOLOGY

Gurpreet Singh

 

On May 18, Canada finally apologized for the Komagata Maru episode. The Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood in the House of Commons to say sorry for the incident that happened more than 100 years ago. Read more…

“THINGS THE LEFT NEEDS TO DO RIGHT”

Prabhat Patnaik

 

Exactly a century ago around this time, Vladimir Lenin was in Zurich completing a manuscript that would go on to become perhaps the most consequential book of the twentieth century. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism may not be the most widely read of Lenin’s works, but it is certainly the most important. Read more…

AIDWA STATEMENT ON TRINAMOOL VIOLENCE AFTER BENGAL ELECTIONS 

AIDWA strongly condemns the heinous attack unleashed by the winning Trinamul Congress activists on the women activists in West Bengal as part of post-poll result violence. Most of AIDWA activists are attacked and hundreds had to flee from the residence in village or city. Read more…

INSAF BULLETIN EXTENDS MAY 1 SALUTE TO THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD!

EDITORIAL: DROUGHT AND THE POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

Several events in South Asia this month warranted an editorial, be it the uncovering of the Panama Papers scam that implicated a variety of South Asian politicians, the continued violence against secularists in Bangladesh, in particular the shocking murder in broad daylight of a Professor at Rajshahi University, or the fact that the Modi government was able to channel pretty large sums of money (at first glance, perhaps thousands of times the money they are persecuting Teesta Setalvad for “misappropriating”) to fake companies in the “KG scam.” The last mentioned event should also raise questions on how much of the Gujarat economic miracle was just a public relations fantasy that Modi used to ride to victory in the parliamentary elections two years ago. Read more…

PAKISTAN: TEXTBOOKS OF HATE

Zubeida Mustafa

 

PAULO Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, said education should aim at teaching students to think critically. They should work with the teacher in creating knowledge. Read more…

BANGLADESH: AUTHORITIES MUST ACT AS ANOTHER SECULAR ACTIVIST HACKED TO DEATH

 

The vicious killing of another secular activist in Bangladesh is a grave reminder that the authorities are failing to protect people exercising their right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International said. Read more…

ANOTHER MURDER IN BANGLADESH: PROFESSOR HACKED TO DEATH

Pen International

 

Bangladesh: University professor hacked to death 23 April 2016 – The tragic and brutal murder of university professor Rezaul Karim Siddique this morning in the northern Bangladesh district of Rajshahi, must be investigated immediately and thoroughly all perpetrators brought to justice, PEN International said today. Read more…

SWACCH BHARAT ABHIYAN INVISIBILISES CASTE AND GLAMOURISES THE BROOM

Bezwada Wilson

 

The 125 day Bhim Yatra which started from Dibrugarh and traversed 30 states and 500 districts to reach Delhi is now over.  Sabrangindia.in has been following the yatra since its first steps to concientise Indians. Read more…

INDIA: HATE SPEECH; HATE CRIMES AND COMMUNAL POLARIZATION

Ram Puniyani

 

While addressing a Sadbhavna rally organized by RSS in Haryana (April, 2016) Baba Ramdev, the entrepreneur cum yoga guru, while referring to Muslims said “Some person wears a cap and stands up, and “… says I will not say ’Bharat Mata ki jai’ even if you decapitate me. Read more…

A DAILY PLEBISCITE – KASHMIR, THE NORTHEAST AND INDIA

Mukul Kesavan

 

Regarding Kashmir and the Northeast, mainstream Indian political opinion – with some exceptions – ignores or underplays the violence inflicted on people who are formally citizens of this republic. Read more…

WHY BUSINESSES LOVE CHHATTISGARH

Sudeep Chakravarti

 

For businesses, it is as if the war with the Maoists doesn’t exist. As if half of Chhattisgarh isn’t a walking, talking, shooting match that ought to keep away businesses with the fear of aiding and abetting conflict. Being made liable for such action by ethics watchdogs and outraged investors. For being at the forefront of corporate social irresponsibility. Read more…

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Zia Mian and M. V. Ramana

 

Nuclear Security Summits have yielded little by focussing on securing small amounts of nuclear material. Any real progress must entail the U.S. and Russia reducing stockpiles and India and Pakistan reining in competitive nuclearisation. Read more…

GODSE’S FINAL SPEECH SHOULD BE COMPARED WITH MODI’S FERVENT WORDS OF PATRIOTISM

UR Ananthamurthy

 

One of India’s greatest storytellers chose the manifesto as the genre for his swan song. One needs the speech of manifestos to cut to the very core of Indian politics, the heart of darkness we call the nation state. Read more…

THE NEW KG SCAM

Jairam Ramesh

 

To pretend to extract non-existent gas requires extraordinary skill and sleight. And to banish all of it into thin air later is even more masterful. This is what the KG scam is all about. Read more…

INDIA – HARYANA: SILENCE AND COVER-UP OF GANG RAPES IN MURTHAL DURING JAT AGITATION?

Unsafe In Murthal: February 22 gang rape survivors deserve better from the Haryana police and government (Times of India – Editorial April 18, 2016) Read more…

NO LOVE FOR AMBEDKAR

Shamsul Islam

 

It is heartening to see Ram Madhav, a seasoned RSS/ BJP leader committed to Hindutva politics, praising Indian democracy, begotten by the “architect of our Constitution”, Bhimrao Ambedkar (‘What Dalits want’, The Indian Express, April 14). Madhav also demands that today’s caste system “go lock, stock and barrel” because it is a “stumbling block in achieving fraternity in society”. It’s indeed very pious, coming from an important functionary of the present government led by RSS pracharaks. Read more…

‘I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE PEN, NOT THE GUN’

Jyoti Punwani

 

Soni Sori doesn’t seek revenge for the torture she suffered at the hands of the Bastar police when branded a Naxal, her true victory will be to tell her story to the world. Read more…

ALLAHABAD HIGH COURT QUASHES DISMISSAL OF PROF. SANDEEP PANDEY

Sabrang India

 

In a landmark judgment that holds out of hope for free expression, and also quoting from Voltaire who famously said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it,” the Allahabad High Court today, ruled in favor of renowned Gandhian, professor and Magsaysay award winner, Dr Sandeep Pandey and quashed the decision of the IIT Banaras Hindu University (BHU) to prematurely terminate his contract.  The fact that the professor was not given a chance to explain the serious charges leveled against him was also strongly rebuked by the High Court. Read more…

EDITORIAL: THE ASSAULT CONTINUES

Vinod Mubayi and Raza Mir

 

The unrelenting attacks on Dalit, progressive, and minority students in universities all around the country by right-wing thugs in cahoots with the police, orchestrated by the Central government, continue unabated. The latest episode is taking place, once again, in the University of Hyderabad (UOH) with brutal attacks by police on students protesting the return of the Vice Chancellor Apparao who had been sent on leave pending an enquiry against him for his role in the death of Rohith Vemula in January. Vemula, a Dalit post-graduate scholar in the university, had been hounded and discriminated against by the university administration to the point where he took his own life, an act that has been labeled an “institutional murder.” Read more…

WITHDRAW POLICE, SUSPEND VC, ORDER PROBE: 300 ACADEMICS ON HCU

Sabrang India

 

Statement of Solidarity By Over 300 International Academics, Activists, Artists and Writers who stand with the students of University of Hyderabad (Hyderabad Central University-HCU) Read more…

DARKNESS AT NOON IN THE ‘LIBERATED ZONE’ OF BASTAR

Nandini Sundar

 

Sukma (Chhattisgarh): The forests of Bastar are teeming with people while the villages are deserted. The Maoists walk the forests, keeping watch on the security forces, who have now taken to camping in the jungles, ostensibly to keep watch on the Maoists. The villagers themselves spend sleepless nights wondering which direction the forces will take and who they will attack next. Across Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur, people have taken to sleeping in the jungle at night or migrating en masse to Telangana to escape dawn raids and the mass round-ups. It is freezing in the open; no one can light fires for fear of being found, and the few blankets they possess are really no protection. Most cover themselves only with a thin cotton lungi. If they don’t die in an ‘encounter’, many will surely fall ill with the cold. Read more…

“37 YRS IN INDIA AND I’VE NEVER FACED PUBLIC HOSTILITY, UNTIL NOW’

Jean Dreze

 

I was surprised to hear yesterday that some people had come to my partner Bela’s house near Jagdalpur and instigated her neighbours against her. They took out a procession in the neighbourhood, shouting slogans like “Bela Bhatia murdabad” and “Bela Bhatia Bastar chodo”. They also distributed a leaflet accusing both of us of being Naxalites who are trying to “tear the country apart” – nothing less. Some of them advised Bela’s landlady to evict her. Fortunately, Bela’s landlady and neighbours are very fond of her and they did not lose their nerve. Read more…

GERMAN BAKERY BLAST ACQUITTAL: THE ATS OWES US AN EXPLANATION

Vijay Hiremath

 

In a span of just two weeks, two investigating agencies in India – the Delhi Police’s Special Cell and Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad – suffered massive setbacks after courts dismissed the theories the agencies built up around two cases by discharging the accused in one, and acquitting another of all terrorism-related charges. Read more…

NAILING THE SANGH PARIVAR’S LIES: HOW THE NAUJAWAN BHARAT SABHA IS DOING IT

SabrangIndia

 

In Mankhurd, a Mumbai suburb, the RSS is faced with a grassroots problem. Undeterred by the local police’s attempt to act at Hindutva’s behest, activists of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) in the area have been distributing leaflets in the area and in local trains exposing the fraudulent bid of the sangh parivar to claim Shaheed Bhagat Singh as their own. Read more…

BHAGAT SINGH AND SAVARKAR, TWO PETITIONS THAT TELL US THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIND AND HINDUTVA

 

Eighty-five years ago, on March 23, 1931, Shaheed Bhagat Singh and his two comrades-in-arms, Shaheed Rajguru and Shaheed Sukhdev were hanged in Lahore by the British colonial government. At the time of his martyrdom, Bhagat Singh was barely 23 years old. Despite the fact that he had his whole life ahead of him, he refused to seek clemency from the British as some well-wishers and family members wanted him to do. In his last petition and testament, he demanded that the British be true to the charge they laid against him of waging war against the colonial state and that he be executed by firing squad and not by hanging. The document also lays out his vision for an India whose working people are free from exploitation by either British or Indian “parasites”. Read more…

#WOMENSDAY2016: IF BRAVERY HAS A NAME, IT IS SONI SORI

Shriya Mohan

 

It’s 7 PM on a Sunday evening and hardly a minute after introducing myself, Soni Sori offers me momos out of a packet she’s helping herself to. The sight is unusual. Here is a woman, once called the greatest internal security threat, falsely implicated to be a Naxalite, one of Chhattisgarh’s only human rights defenders, a survivor of countless police brutalities and attempts to silence her, the recent one being blacking her face with a tar like substance that caused intense chemical burns and required her to be flown to the capital to be hospitalised in Apollo Hospital’s burn ward. Read more…

PAKISTAN: EASTER MASSACRE

Mahir Ali

 

THERE are times when it is possible to be shocked and horrified without entirely being surprised. Sunday’s atrocity in Lahore falls into that category. The mass murder in a public park, evidently aimed primarily at Christians celebrating Easter, in the full knowledge that a large proportion of the victims would be children, epitomises the mindless brutality of forces unleashed almost four decades ago. Read more…

A CRISIS FOR MINORITIES IN PAKISTAN

Rozina Ali

 

When the bomb went off in Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, on Sunday, families were settled into the lull of Easter celebrations. Picnics were out and children were scattered across the playground. The suicide bomber walked purposefully to the swings before blowing himself up, along with the kids around him. More than seventy people died in the attack, at least twenty-nine of them children, and more than three hundred people were wounded. One reporter who arrived at the scene told me that victims were rushed to the hospital in ambulances, taxis, private cars, and rickshaws, while surviving children were rounded up as security guards tried to find their families. Read more…

SUICIDE BOMBING IN LAHORE IS THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO SHUT PUBLIC SPACES AND SILENCE MINORITY VOICES

Rosita Armytage

 

Minorities are increasingly facing exclusion from Pakistan’s public realm; and it’s not only terrorists who are responsible. Read more…

LAHORE ATTACK — WHERE DO THE REAL FAULT LINES LIE?

Akhtar Abbas

 

Gulshan-e-Iqbal is a big public park situated in Lahore’s Allama Iqbal Town. The place has long stretches of grass where families spend their leisure time eating home-made food over a spread bedsheet, or go boating in the lake, or explore the maze of inner Lahore or take joy rides in electric gondolas. Read more…

IS THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT TURNING A BLIND EYE TO TALIBAN VIOLENCE?

Dawn

 

ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan announced that the government will clear the D-Chowk of protesters on Wednesday “at any cost”, if they don’t disperse by themselves in the night. Read more…

DR. DAYA VARMA AND PROF. HARI SHARMA: MEMORIAL MEETING

Rana Bose

 

This meeting has been organized as we all know by the West Bengal chapter of PIPFPD, to honour the memory of Daya Varma and Ved Bhasin. I will be talking about Daya and as well as, his close friend and comrade Hari Sharma. Both of who went to Canada some 55 years ago and have consistently fought for progressive values abroad.  In 2015 we lost Daya Varma. In 2010 we had already lost Hari Sharma. Both to cancer. Read more…

INDIA TODAY: FOLLOWING THE NAZI PATH

Editors

 

A form of fascism reminiscent of Nazi Germany is being enacted in India today. While the analogy is only partial it is nonetheless highly suggestive. Of course there are bound to be many differences between two countries a century and a continent apart. But if one recalls the praise showered on the racial policies of the Nazis by none other than Guru Golwalkar, one of the founders of the RSS, the similarities become clearer. Read more…

BE WARNED, THE ASSAULT ON JNU IS PART OF A PATTERN

Romila Thapar

 

There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research. Read more…

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ‘NATIONAL’

Prabhat Patnaik

 

Nationalism that developed in India during the anti-colonial struggle was sui generis, an altogether new phenomenon the like of which the world had not seen earlier. It was essentially a democratic and egalitarian nationalism, as opposed to the aggrandising European form. Read more…

INDIA’S ANGST

Irfan Husain

 

“PATRIOTISM”, said Samuel Johnson in 1775, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

 

Over the intervening years, this famous quote may have become a cliché, but has lost none of its sting. This is because patriotism continues to be used to whip up virulent nationalism and fierce religious extremism. Governments and demagogues constantly appeal to this base sentiment to control and direct citizens and mobs. Read more…

THE COMING OF NIGHT – INDIA’S DESCENT INTO MUSCLE POWER

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

 

The famous declaration of Gopal Krishna Gokhale about what Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow has become an irrelevant cliché. No one seriously thinks of Bengal today as the harbinger of the future in the world of ideas or in any other sphere. But the time is upon us to revive and retrieve that declaration not with pride but in shame. Read more…

GOD, HOLY TEMPLES AND UNHOLY WOMEN

Neha Dabhade

 

The news is abuzz with the protests led by women to enter holy shrines – be it the temple of Sabarimala, Shani Shingnapur or Haji Ali. These women have one very fundamental and seemingly simple demand – entry to the shrines. Read more…

BAN RSS, INDIA’S NO 1 TERROR ORGANIZATION: FORMER MAHARASHTRA COP

Hindustan Times, Feb. 23, 2016

 

Maharashtra’s former inspector general of police SM Mushrif on Tuesday accused the Intelligence Bureau (IB) of being hand-in-glove with right-wing extremists, and called for a ban on the RSS describing it as India’s No.1 terror organisation. Read more…

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…

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