Muzaffar Raina A public interaction between BJP leaders and Kashmiri Pandit and Dalit employees from Jammu who have left the Valley following a spate in targeted killings turned into an embarrassment for the party, with the participants’ accounts shredding its all-is-well line in Kashmir. Speaker after speaker at Thursday’s live-streamed meeting in Jammu described how the… Read More Accounts by J&K Pandits rip BJP’s Valley veneer
Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 First posted March 30, 2012 This article is based on a lecture I prepared for university students, named Mahatma Gandhi’s Legacy. It includes the text of the Delhi Declaration on communal harmony, January 18, 1948. Citations are from Gandhi’s Collected Works Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 From September 1947,… Read More Another time, another mosque
First posted January 31, 2015 यह चिट्ठी महात्मा मोहनदास करमचंद गाँधी को पहुंचे. महात्माजी, मैं न संसद-सदस्य हूँ, न विधायक, न मंत्री, न नेता. इनमें से कोई कलंक मेरे ऊपर नहीं है. मुझमें कोई ऐसा राजनीतिक ऐब नहीं है कि आपकी जय बोलूं. मुझे कोई भी पद नहीं चाहिये कि राजघाट जाऊँ. मैंने आपकी समाधि… Read More हरिशंकर परसाई: महात्मा गाँधी को चिट्ठी पहुँचे (1977)
In any other time and place, in any other part of the world, seven mass shootings in seven days, nearly two every day of the current year, would not be called “senseless,” “insane” and “barbaric.” Why? Because in any other time and place, in any other part of the world, seven mass shootings in seven… Read More So much mass death: The insurgency we refuse to see
First posted June 15, 2020 NB: Since the Black Lives Matter movement, some intellectuals have begun (yet again) their campaign to slander Gandhiji as a ‘racist’. An interview published in The Caravan in January 2019 reiterated this. Much can be said about the prejudices of various leaders, and I have appended some comments beneath that interview. Leaving India… Read More Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”, September 1958
NB: Jail without trial for 4 years and counting. Stan Swamy died in custody, without interrogation or a trial. This is Indian justice today under the BJP-RSS government, a political group that weeps crocodile tears about the victims of the 1974 Emergency. They also criticize the retention of colonial era education and justice. Preventive detention… Read More A Professor’s Supreme Court Bail Hearing Is A Bellwether Case For Govt’s Use of India’s Anti-Terror Law
Final immersion ceremony of the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi at Allahabad on February 12, 1948. Credit: Photo Division, GOI Pavan Kulkarni Five months after India’s independence, on January 14, 1948, three members of the Hindu Mahasabha – Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge, an arms dealer regularly selling weapons to the Mahasabha – arrived… Read More How Savarkar Escaped Conviction For Gandhi’s Assassination
By Stefanie Dodt, ARD German TV A year after the US barred Mexicans from crossing the border to sell their blood, pharmaceutical companies have acknowledged that those donations provided as much as 10% of the plasma collected nationwide as they seek to have the ban overturned. US investigative non-profit online newsroom ProPublica reports. n the… Read More Pharma companies sue for right to buy blood from Mexicans along border
Ironically, the late Asma Jahangir’s last public appearance and speech were at a demonstration led by Pashteen in Islamabad, February 2018, against the extrajudicial killing of a Pashtun youth in a ‘police encounter’ in Karachi in January 2018. The protest marked the launch of the PTM. Jahangir passed away just days later at her home in Lahore. Since then,… Read More Struggles for democracy and human rights in South Asia: Taking forward Asma Jahangir’s legacy
Protesters at the funeral of a young boy whose family say was killed by Iranian security forces have chanted anti-regime slogans and ridiculed the official account of his death. Hundreds of mourners flocked to the city of Izeh in south-western Iran for the funeral of Kian Pirfalak, according to footage posted online. His mother said at the funeral ceremony… Read More Iranian protesters chant anti-regime slogans at boy’s funeral
After the truth-shower 