Tag: current affairs – India

India’s News Upstarts Challenged Modi. New Rules Could Tame Them. By Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar

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

Dilip

Amita Baviskar: Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In

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

Dilip

SC stands up for voicing disapproval, backs editor Patricia Mukhim

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

Dilip

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

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

Dilip

The Modi Government Is a Regime of Low-Intensity Terror. By Ullekh N.P.

Not many academics have studied Hindu nationalism with the intensity of Stanford University anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen. The 63-year-old’s new book, The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics, argues that anger and brutality have become mainstream in public life and politics in India. The 176-page volume delves into what Hansen calls “the emergence of… Read More The Modi Government Is a Regime of Low-Intensity Terror. By Ullekh N.P.

Dilip

Surinder S. Jodhka: Changing Modes of Agriculture in Punjab

The Punjabi farmer has found it hard to escape the whirlpool of an ecologically unviable cropping pattern and its commercial entrapments created by the history of its past six decades.   Despite Punjab’s meagre size, the region has remained an important constituent in the self-imagination of the Indian nation. The imprints of Punjab’s agrarian economy and… Read More Surinder S. Jodhka: Changing Modes of Agriculture in Punjab

Dilip

Nagraj Adve: Coming of Age of India’s Youth Climate Movement

The arrest in February of Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old member of the climate change organisation Fridays for Future (FFF) India, on charges including sedition and criminal conspiracy, and warrants issued against two members of Extinction Rebellion (XR) India, Nikita Jacob and Shantanu Muluk, have severely jolted innumerable climate activists, students, and other young people in… Read More Nagraj Adve: Coming of Age of India’s Youth Climate Movement

Dilip

AKHILESH PANDEY – The farmers’ protest may grow into a second “total revolution”: JP movement activists

Social activists who were part of the JP movement, led by the political activist Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s, see echoes of that movement in the ongoing farmers’ protest. In March 1974, the JP movement began as a student-led protest in Bihar against unemployment, which soon gained Narayan’s support. The movement subsequently fought against corruption… Read More AKHILESH PANDEY – The farmers’ protest may grow into a second “total revolution”: JP movement activists

Dilip