Gag orders are expected to ensure a fair trial in high profile legal cases if the judge feels that the media narrative is pushing public opinion in favour of one party. But a gag order by the Executive is harder to justify. The government has threatened to withhold pensions of officers retiring from its security and intelligence… Read More Bharat Bhushan: Threat to withhold pensions: Govt attempts to gag criticism
“By academic freedom, I understand the right to search for truth and publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right also implies a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognised to be true.” – Albert Einstein Sign the petition: http://chng.it/7b2b6CDY Dr Gilbert Sebastian, an Assistant Professor at the… Read More Petition re Suspension of academic in Kerala because he talked about fascism and Sangh Parivar
Om Gaur is in the middle of the most heart-wrenching story of his career as a journalist. Earlier this month, Gaur — the national editor at Dainik Bhaskar, one of the world’s biggest-selling newspapers — got a tip that dead bodies had been spotted floating in the Ganges River in Bihar, a state in eastern India. Given how… Read More Diksha Madhok: Indian journalism and the Corona Pandemic
It is time to liberate our media systems from the political and economic forces that have long subtly controlled them Monday will mark World Press Freedom Day. It’s a moment to celebrate the work that journalism does in holding power to account. It’s also a moment to raise awareness of the dangers facing journalists in… Read More Dan Hind – 1400 journalists have been murdered since 1991: Rewrite journalism to achieve press freedom
In the ‘cancel culture’ era, universities should remember that the original purpose of free speech was to empower the weak, not to shelter them. Universities in the US and the UK have become a battleground in the war between safe speech and free speech. I believe that this is a false dilemma – and understanding… Read More Albena Azmanova: Safe speech vs free speech: higher education’s false dilemma
Online portals have practiced aggressive journalism in a mostly compliant media landscape. But trolls and the government could now be empowered to stop them. India’s prime minister has cultivated and cowed large parts of the country’s normally raucous news media in recent years as part of a broader campaign against dissent. One group remains untamed: A relatively new generation… Read More India’s News Upstarts Challenged Modi. New Rules Could Tame Them. By Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar
NB: Fedor Stepun was a Russian writer, editor, professor, political commentator. In 1922, he. along with over 200 non-communist intellectuals perceived as hostile to the Bolshevik regime. was arrested and ordered to leave the USSR within a week. They included the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, and scores of other academicians, writers, artists, editors of journals etc. DS… Read More Fedor Stepun, 1884-1965
After having worked most of my life in a public university and research institute, I started teaching at Ashoka last year. So my response to the many commentaries on the ongoing debacle at this private university comes from being an outsider as well as an insider. This ‘squint-eyed perspective,’ as fellow-sociologist Satish Deshpande has described… Read More Amita Baviskar: Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In
Expressing disapproval of a government’s action “cannot be branded as an attempt to promote hatred between different communities”, the Supreme Court said Thursday while quashing an FIR against Patricia Mukhim, the editor of Shillong Times, over a social media post about an incident of assault on some non-tribal youth in Meghalaya last year. A bench of… Read More SC stands up for voicing disapproval, backs editor Patricia Mukhim
NB: Democratic rights are not presented to us on a platter by managements, howsoever liberal they portray themselves to be. Professor Rajendran Narayanan’s experience is evidence of that; as well as of the truism that our access to the justice and fair-play is directly linked to our socio-economic status. That is why workers, and even… Read More Rajendran Narayanan: What I learnt about power and privilege when I quit Ashoka in 2016 / Yogendra Yadav: No one is asking the right questions about Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ouster from Ashoka University
After the truth-shower 