Mukul Kesavan The morning of the fourth of June found India’s non-bhakt citizens curled in a fetal position. Braced against news of the four-hundred-foretold by the exit polls, sapped by a decade of electoral defeats, they had decided not to suffer the drawn-out torment of a televised count. Better to get the bad news all at… Read More The Great Escape: When India’s Political Landscape Shifted
This is Haaretz’s lead editorial for June 7, 2024; as published in Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel Israeli right-wing activists attacking Palestinian freelance journalist Saif Kwasmi during a march commemorating Jerusalem Day, on Wednesday. Credit: Hazem Bader/AFP It is impossible to watch the photographic documentation of the ugly, violent demonstrators during Wednesday’s parade of… Read More The Brutalization of Israel Is Well Underway. If we do not act, collapse is only a matter of time
NB: This is a fascinating account of one of the most deadly confrontations of modern times. I learned from it that Ayatollah Khomeini was less interested in religious orthodoxy than in seizing absolute power and cutting down moderate clerics to size, and used the book to assert his authority; that Rushdie’s assailant Hadi Matar, 26,… Read More Rushdie, Khomeini and Me
NB: The systematic destruction of India’s criminal justice system is something that few bother to investigate. As a result we carry on as if nothing has happened. Mass carnage, rampant corruption, disappearance of witnesses, the mysterious death of a judge siting on a crucial case, death in custody of an 84 year old priest with… Read More Ex-Arunachal CM’s Explosive Suicide Note that the government refused to probe (2017)
Narendra Modi and the BJP fought this election in only his name. The lack of majority, then, should come down to him. Ashutosh Bhardwaj One can call it a Surya-Tilak in Ayodhya. The rejection of temple politics, it’s a telegram from Uttar Pradesh to the Varanasi MP. The state that gifted him the Delhi throne… Read More Seven Reasons Why Modi Has No Moral or Political Right to Head the Next Government
@ Amnesty International On JUNE 4, 1989, hundreds – possibly thousands – of protesters peacefully calling for economic and social reforms were killed by troops around Tiananmen Square. Today, in the face of an escalating crackdown on free expression by the Chinese government, the memory of what happened on Tiananmen Square teeters on the brink of… Read More Remembering Tiananmen Square: Defending Memory Amidst Repression
Biden’s plan to cozy up to Arab dictators is right out of Donald Trump’s playbook — but even worse. Aída Chávez WHY DOES Joe Biden insist on pursuing a foreign policy of blind support of Israel’s war on Gaza? In addition to the moral calamity — on full display as Israel bombed Palestinian refugee camps in… Read More Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia
Rachel Savage in Johannesburg South Africa is facing the uncertain possibility of a coalition government after the former president Jacob Zuma’s new party upended the country’s elections, contributing to the African National Congress party’s vote share collapsing well below half, with more than two-thirds of voting stations counted. By late afternoon on Thursday, the ANC, which has governed South Africa with… Read More South Africa: ANC reels from vote collapse
NAMRATA RAJU The ghosts of migrant workers haunting the facades of the buildings they once constructed makes for striking imagery. It is also true that the invisibilisation of migrant workers is just that extreme. Whether in literary fiction such as Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, or scholarship like anthropologist Andrea Wright’s Between Dreams and Ghosts, it… Read More From Guest Workers to Ghost Workers: The Electoral Exclusion of India’s Migrants
Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that’s what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in… Read More Israel’s Tents Massacre in Rafah Is a Heinous War Crime / Israel Is Blind to Rafah’s Inferno, but Its Own Ruin Is Entwined With Gaza’s
After the truth-shower 