January 11, 2022
PUCL strongly condemns the registration of FIR by the CBI against Centre for Promotion of Social Concerns (CPSC) and its initiative, People’s Watch on 6th January 2022 for alleged FCRA violations of the year 2012, and raids conducted by CBI officials at their office in Madurai on 8th January 2022.
PUCL expresses serious concern over the increasing criminalization and denial of permissions under FCRA to civil society organisations working on democratic rights, environmental rights, civil liberties and social justice issues in the country.
PUCL urges the central government to immediately stop the use of FCRA as a weapon to repress dissenting voices in the civil society and create hurdles in the valuable work of NGOs in the field of human rights.
January 8, 2022
Many will have seen that video from a Karnataka village where a couple of brave women ask vigilantes barging into their simple home to clear out. The vigilantes were “accusing” the women of singing Christmas songs. I refrain from giving here the link to the video because I don’t wish to provoke a fresh attack on vulnerable women who first committed the crime of singing songs they like inside their home, and then had the temerity to ask aggressive intruders to leave.
That Karnataka image summed up the state of affairs even better than the Haridwar video where saffron-clad individuals gave their call for killing Muslims. The former image showed, frighteningly, that…
January 7, 2022
For decades, India was seen as a rare democratic success story in the developing world. But, by barring NGOs, including Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, from receiving foreign funding, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has once again demonstrated that it has a very different vision of India.
January 5, 2022
Now that the Ministry of Home Affairs has finally decided to cut off foreign funding to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, this international order of nuns will have to stop its care of the poorest of the poor. What was surprising is that it took the government more time than expected to concoct a plausible story to justify its action. A couple of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon case say it took a couple of years to fix their computers in order to rope them in. It should have been much, much easier to foist false cases on unsuspecting Catholic nuns whose only mission in life is to spread love and compassion and whose knowledge of worldly affairs…
January 5, 2022
‘The Quint’ (3 January 2022) has an article ‘Events on Christ will end with “Jai Sri Ram”: Behind Church Attacks in Haryana’. The article speaks about the slew of anti- Christian attacks in Haryana during the Christmas Season. It details a Christmas Celebration of some followers of Jesus in Kurukshetra which was disrupted by the goons of the local Bajrang Dal. The article goes on to quote the threat of the so-called convenor of the Bajrang Dal who says, “consider this Bajrang Dal’s warning in clear words, if something like this is attempted again, we will deal with you properly. This time, we didn’t say anything to you, but next time, we wont spare you!” Strangely enough that inspite of the…
January 4, 2022
We go to New Delhi, India, to speak with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy about the pandemic, U.S. militarism and the state of journalism. Roy first appeared on Democracy Now! after receiving widespread backlash for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time, her emphatic antiwar stance clashed with the rising tides of patriotism and calls for war after 9/11. “Now the same media is saying what we were saying 20 years ago,” says Roy. “But the trouble is, it’s too late.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/29/author_arundhati_roy_on_independent_media
January 3, 2022
Come December, Christians begin preparations in earnest as they look forward to celebrating Christmas in a solemn, peaceful and joyous manner, the highpoint being the Holy Mass in churches. But this time around, Christians in Karnataka are a worrie…
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January 3, 2022
One Sunday in October, Pastor Somu Avaradhi got a shock when he entered his church in Hubballi city in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.
“There were people sitting inside, singing Hindu religious songs and shouting slogans,” he told the BBC.
He says he called the police, but when they arrived, the protesters accused him of abusing and forcing a Hindu man to convert to Christianity. The pastor was arrested – under charges of “outraging the religious feelings of any class” – and spent 12 days in prison before he was released on bail.
January 3, 2022
When Joe Biden convened his virtual Summit for Democracy today, Narendra Modi was among the attendees. The Indian prime minister is the steward of the world’s largest democracy. Any conversation about global democratic decline, and what can be done to reverse it, would be incomplete without his participation.
Modi’s involvement in the summit nevertheless looks odd—even awkward—considering the role that he has played in precipitating democratic decline. Since coming to power in 2014, Modi has overseen a steady transformation of India from the secular democracy envisioned by its founders into a majoritarian, Hindu-nationalist state—one that demonizes its minority groups, undermines civil liberties, and crushes dissent. The democracy watchdog Freedom House took this deterioration into account when it…
NEW DELHI – The restrictive, illiberal trend that has come to characterize India over the last five years has a new data point. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government decided that Christmas Day was a good time to deny renewal of a license for the Missionaries of Charity to receive foreign funding.
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