Ashoka University academic’s arrest shows how rapidly universities, once spaces for debate and discussion, are pushed towards restraint and silences. Deepanshu Mohan Wilhelm von Humboldt, a great liberal reformer and a humanist, once defined the university as “nothing other than the spiritual life of those human beings who are moved by external leisure or internal pressures… Read More Criminalising thought?
The signal sought to be sent to Muslim intellectuals is clear: their right to free expression disappears if they criticise the government. If you are a Muslim, you may have the right to breathe – but even that is not guaranteed. What is certain is that you do not have the right to express your… Read More The Sole Reason Behind Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s Arrest Is That He Is a Muslim
Avay Shukla Going beyond the nit picking about the number of “assets” lost by India and Pakistan, it is now clear that we have inflicted significant losses on the latter. In doing so our defence forces have also demonstrated the technological and air power to enforce the Prime Minister’s stated resolve to extract a heavy… Read More Our soldiers won the war for us – but politics and the media have undone their good work
Speaking to The Wire, Ali Khan Mahmudabad said he had been misquoted by legacy media and denied deleting any posts. He has described the notice as a new form of censorship. New Delhi: The Haryana State Commission For Women on May 12 summoned Ali Khan Mahmudabad, head of the political science department at Ashoka University, over remarks… Read More ‘Inverted the Meaning, Invented an Issue’: Professor on Women’s Panel’s summons
The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict Norman Solomon The last helicopter liftoff from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam war. Fifty years later, mythology about US media coverage of… Read More The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson
According to Apoorvanand Jha, a professor at DU, the university had informed him that his leave application could not be approved without consultation with the Union Ministry of Education. NEW DELHI: Delhi University (DU) professor Apoorvanand Jha said that the university administration has asked him to submit the text of his proposed lecture at an… Read More ‘Alarming’: DU asks professor to submit text of proposed lecture at US university for leave approval
First posted August 07, 2015 The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known. I recently published a social history of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based… Read More Janet Farrell Brodie: Secrecy & Censorship in the Wake of the Atomic Bombings
Levine describes the early concept of the internet as “an operating system for the American empire, an information system that could collect all this data and that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world.” Yasha Levine / The Chris Hedges Report The internet, from its inception, was created to be a… Read More The Secret Military History of the Internet
It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is… Read More American Freefall
The last decade in India has been marred by the institutionalisation of arbitrary power. Raghu Kesavan Kunal Kamra is an unlikely hero. He stands slightly hunched over, mic loosely held in one hand, the other occasionally pressed into service to express disbelief but often stuffed into a trouser pocket. His most recent special, Naya Bharat, reprises the… Read More How the attacks on Kunal Kamra undermine the freedoms of all Indians
After the truth-shower 