Mainstream Weekly

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  Table of Contents, Mainstream, Jan 8, 2022

  7 January 2022

  * The Year of Fear | John Dayal
  * Challenges to the Narendra Modi Government in 2022 | P S Jayaramu
  * Rajput Sodhas suffer due to India-Pakistan visa issues | Beena Sarwar
  * Audio: Knowing Nature - conversation with Profs Vinita Damodaran and Harriet Ritvo

• Letter to the readers, Mainstream, Jan 8, 2022

  7 January 2022

  Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, January 8, 2022
  It’s been many years now that there is growing social and political tolerance, for a culture of violence that has come to include vigilantism, lynchings, sexual assault and hateful public speeches calling for ethnic cleansing or communal violence, intimidation of critics, acts of vandalism against places of prayer of minorities, etc by some members of India’s ruling party, or political groupings claiming allegiance to Hindutva or other (…)

• How To Eat Your Cake And Have It Too | T J S George

  7 January 2022, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  Now that 2022 is two days old, how are things fanning out? Too early to say, perhaps. But the usual tendency to decry the old and welcome the new is not as strong as in previous New Year seasons. The sense of bad days is persisting. Optimism is being diluted by continuing setbacks. There have been 3.48 crore Corona cases during the year with 4.8 lakh deaths. And there are no signs of things easing up.
  One reason for this is the overwhelming importance of (…)

• The Year of Fear | John Dayal

  7 January 2022, by John Dayal

  It has been a year of fear.
  The trauma of mass deaths in Covid, the bodies floating down the holy River Ganges or waiting hours for their turn at cremation grounds, has not faded.
  By the end of the year, the fear of death by a pandemic disease is perhaps replaced by a pit in the stomach for being butchered by a religious and nationalist fanatic mob whose baying was heard on Christmas Day.
  The politician, the government official, the police will look on, helpless or in complicit (…)

• Challenges to the Narendra Modi Government in 2022 | P S Jayaramu

  7 January 2022, by P S Jayaramu

  by P.S. Jayaramu (28th December 2021)
  The year 2021 was a mixed bag for the Modi Government if one looks at it from a liberal angle. A mixed bag because the first half of the year saw the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic, leading to a heavy caseload and deaths. The government, obsessed as it was with the Bengal assembly elections paid little heed to the forecasts of the health experts about the severity of the covid pandemic. Government’s unpreparedness to deal with the crisis (…)

• Satya Pal Malik’s protest to the government | Prem Singh

  7 January 2022, by Prem Singh

  Meghalaya Governor Satya Pal Malik’s stand has not softened even after the government withdrew three controversial agri-laws. Speaking at a social function in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri town on January 2, he said that when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the question of farmers’ agitation and raised the issue of the death of 500 farmers, the PM’s attitude was arrogant. He also said that their meeting ended in an argument. In other words, Malik conveyed the message that he went to the (…)

• Bhiwani Tragedy Again Highlights Pressing Need for Reforms in Stone Mining For Protecting Workers and Environment | Bharat Dogra

  7 January 2022, by Bharat Dogra

  On the morning of January 1, in Dadam area of Bhiwani district, Haryana, a huge portion of a hill being mined for its stone fell down with a very loud blast. The death of 3 workers was reported soon after this. Serious concern has been expressed that a higher number of workers may have been buried under big stones. What could be seen be immediately was that the stones which fell from a big height were so huge that several dumper truck and machines were buried under this. What is not yet (…)

• Hindi and Urdu | B S Chauhan

  7 January 2022, by B. S. Chauhan

  The politics in the country was not as divisive and toxic in the sixties, when I was a child in Dehradun, as it is now. Urdu, for we siblings, was a secular language and not associated with a community or religion. Could be because, being rooted firmly in Uttar Pradesh for generations, we were spared the horrors of partition.
  Our father would write his notes and his shopping lists in Urdu only though he knew English and Hindi quite well. His Urdu jottings were beyond us. Father, born in a (…)

• What’s On! Halt This Politics Of Hate! | Humra Quraishi

  7 January 2022, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  5 January 2022
  Its just too horrifying and sickening to see the Hindutva politics of hate has reached this level of the unthinkable lows. Manufacturing of websites to put up photographs of Muslim women…hitting a community that already stands shattered. New onslaughts, official or unofficial, targeting Muslim women, children and youth.
  Facts to the Muslim community are out there in the open. Documented in the reports of the Sachar Committee, Gopal Singh Committee, Kundu (…)

• Hate Crimes in a BJP-ruled State | Arup Kumar Sen

  7 January 2022, by Arup Kumar Sen

  Hate crimes against minority communities have become an organic part of our polity after the BJP came to power at the Centre and in different states.
  Very recently, PUCL, Karnataka, has documented 39 incidents of hate crimes against the Christians in the State in its Report — Criminalising the Practice of Faith (December 2021). The crimes took place in the time span of January to November 2021.
  In most cases, the Christians have been forced to shut down their places of worship and stop (…)