October 19, 2019
Which side are you, Mr. Rajnath Singh, Union Home Minister of Democratic-Secular India?
Shamsul Islam
Rajnath Singh ji,
While talking to The India Express (New Delhi, August 24, 1914(?)) you described yourself as “Swayamsewak of RSS”. As a Home Minister of the country you must have taken oath to uphold the Indian Constitution which is based on the principles of democracy, secularism, federalism, socialism and justice. However, there is going to be a serious conflict of interests between above mentioned fundamental principles of the Indian polity and your membership of RSS. As a member of RSS you must be well aware that RSS hates and denigrates all above mentioned fundamental principles of democratic-secular India. I am quoting below directly from RSS documents…
October 18, 2019
Home minister Amit Shah and a CRPF constable expressed ideas sharply antithetical to human rights principles from the NHRC’s platform, yet were commended by the commission for doing so.
Within a matter of days, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of India found itself on the wrong foot twice. In the first instance, a ‘hate speech’ video of a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) constable delivered last month during a debate competition organised by the NHRC went viral, causing consternation. In the second, inviting Amit Shah, once an accused in fake encounter cases, as chief guest for the commission’s foundation day celebrations, has raised eyebrows.
On September 27, Khushboo Chauhan, a constable of the CRPF, delivered an emotive speech which was…
October 18, 2019
Asifa Mubeen, the wife of Mubeen Ahmad Shah, sought the quashing of the August 7 order to detain the latter.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Jammu and Kashmir administration as to why it has not filed a reply on a plea by the wife of a Malaysia-based NRI businessman challenging his detention following abrogation of provisions of Article 370.
A bench headed by Justice N.V. Ramana observed that the matter relates to “personal liberty” and the J&K administration should have filed its reply on the plea.
“Why you (J&K administration) have not filed the reply?,” said the bench, also comprising justices R. Subhash Reddy and B.R. Gavai, adding, “This is a matter regarding personal liberty. You should have…
October 18, 2019
The word lynching is of foreign origin. But this does not mean that mob killings are alien to India
In the years since Narendra Modi was elected in 2014, ugly mob hate has spilled onto the streets, trains and people’s homes. Fevered throngs surround, brutally assault and sometimes kill unarmed men, mostly Muslim. The crowds allege that the men had slaughtered cows, or were thieves; but sometimes their only crime — as when a child was stabbed to death on a crowded train near Delhi — is that they are visibly Muslim.
Living in denial
We describe these mob killings as lynching. The initial response of the ruling establishment to criticism of this frightening rising graph of lynching during the Modi regime…
October 18, 2019
BJP’s poll promise of Bharat Ratna for Savarkar, who inspired a wide spectrum of fanatic individuals and violent organisations, shows the moral vacuousness of the Hindutva project.
“The curious fact is that as we move into the 21st century, historians have become central to politics. We historians are the monopoly suppliers of the past. The only way to modify the past that does not sooner or later go through historians is by destroying the past….Mythology is taking over from knowledge”.
Read more:
https://www.newsclick.in/Savarkar-India-Ratna-of-a-Different-Kind
October 18, 2019
Gandhi Anniversary: An Occasion to Gain legitimacy for Some
Ram Puniyani.
The media is full of articles and videos on the occasion of 150th birth anniversary of the ‘father of the nation’, Mahatma Gandhi. While there is a genuine attempt by most to recapture the teachings and path of Gandhi as relevant to contemporary India, there are those also those who are using the occasion to increase their own legitimacy.. This is done be a clever maneuver of picking bits and pieces from his writing or incidences and also by quoting him partly leaving out the part critical to those quotes.
This is true about Hindu nationalists; the RSS combine in particular. While on one hand in a clever move they have…
October 18, 2019
The Indian revolutionary, who popularized the slogan ‘Inqilab Zindabad’, demanded that the British send a military detachment to execute him by firing squad; the Hindu nationalist promised to give up the fight for freedom if released – and kept his word.
Note: This article was first published on March 23, 2016 and is being republished on September 28, 2019, Bhagat Singh’s birth anniversary.
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…
October 18, 2019
Amnesty International India
5 October 2019 3:38 pm
In the current crisis, the Indian state has morphed into an ugly monster in the eyes of Kashmiris – with each new assertion, it sprouts a new limb, a third eye, a pulsating nose. The anger is palpable. It is hard to escape it. Curses from the old and cusses from the young ring loud in each conversation on India. The oldest and wisest, are calm – unfazed. They have seen it all. Their experience has taught them better – you cannot trust the mainland. As is typical of all abusive relationships, the abuser starts by building tension. There is then an act of violence, and later attempts at reconciliation. Finally, there is…
October 17, 2019
“The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes,” Amartya Sen says.Photographs by Tony Luong for The New Yorker
Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, philosopher, and public intellectual, lives on a quiet street in Cambridge, just around the corner from Harvard Square. His home, which he shares with his wife, the historian Emma Rothschild, is spacious but cluttered, with old newspapers and magazines lying about and copies of Sen’s books on crowded tables. There are also photos of Ted Turner and Kofi Annan; framed paintings of the philosophers John Rawls and…
October 17, 2019
New Delhi: A full-blown war of words is raging between Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat and a top Catholic body over- who invented the word “lynching”.
Taking umbrage to Bhagwat’s remarks dissociating the Hindu community with rising incidents of mob lynching in the country and instead linking the term to Christianity, the All India Catholic Union (AICU) has issued a detailed statement lashing out at both the RSS and the country’s ruling BJP and questioned Bhagwat’s “political intentions” behind the remark.
At the foundation day function of the RSS on October 8, Bhagwat had spoken at length about the phenomenon of mob lynching. “No one from the Sangh gets into such troubles. If some such thing is about to…