Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015)
Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey).
Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst); Ajay Bhardwaj (Vancouver).
Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
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…
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