2010

Part-I
“If someone takes someone’s life (deliberately and not accidentally) then he forfeits the right to his life”.
—John Stuart Mill
The judgment delivered by a Division Bench in quadruple murders of members of the Bhotmange family, village Khairlanji, district Bhandara in Maharashtra left everyone with a sensitive mind shocked and dismayed. Surekha Bhotmange and her 18-year-old daughter and two sons, including one who was disabled, were brutally murdered by an upper-caste mob on (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local by A.K. Mohanty, M. Panda, R. Phillipson and T. Skutnabb-Kangas (eds.); Orient Blackswan Private Limited, New Delhi; 2009; pages 400.
One of the aspects of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the preservation of linguistic heritage. Linguistic globalisation, which has given English a predominant position, can lead to the extinction of many indigenous languages. To preserve the (…)

by Swadha
In a bid to give a sharp edge to the anti-Naxal operations in the four worst affected States of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Orissa, the Union Government has recently decided to set up a powerful Unified Command headed by the respective Chief Secretaries to fight the Maoist menace. The government has been unusually proactive in grappling with the surge in the violence unleashed by the Maoists. It is clearly ruffled as is evident from the urgency and seriousness being (…)

In the afternoon on July 5, 2010, the security forces, comprising the JAP and SAF under the leadership of E.H. Siddique, the officer-in-charge of Tamar Police Station, arrived in Gunti village and picked up 45-year-old Etwa Munda of Papirdah village (which comes under Tamar Police Station of Ranchi district in Jharkhand), when he was in the house of his relative Manav Munda. The police also caught a girl, Bengi Kumari, and escorted both of them towards Jabla pahari (forest). After sometime, (…)

The PM’s 90-minute interaction with a select group of editors in New Delhi on September 6 was intended to convey to the media and the public at large that the UPA-II dispensation headed by Dr Manmohan Singh was not gripped by a sense of drift as is the dominant impression today. There is no gainsaying that this impression has been strengthened by the head of government’s lacklustre performance in Parliament’s monsoon session if one excludes his impassioned speech during discussion on the (…)

September 11, 2001. The world stood aghast at the real-time TV screening of the audacious, coordinated attack on the WTC and Pentagon and trembled when, weeks later, the USA invaded Afghanistan in retaliation to what was under-stood as an Al-Qaeda attack under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. This was first seen as a knee-jerk reaction to retrieve American pride and prop up the USA’s international image, but soon enough the world interpreted it as a strategic move to gain a secure foothold (…)

It is surprising how intelligent people in politics sometimes take up positions which should logically belong to their adversaries.
The Muslim League in 1940 picked up the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ which a bunch of extremist intellectuals had first coined to back up their demand for Pakistan. Other parties in India rejected it. The Congress made it clear that it did not accept the theory itself though it agreed to the partitioning of the country on the basis of the very same (…)

With no breakthrough in the over three-year-old Samjautha Express blast case, the government has decided to hand over its probe to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to unravel the conspiracy. “The Samjhauta blast case has been handed over to the NIA,” Special Secretary (Internal Security) in the Home Ministry Utthan Kumar Bansal told reporters on the sidelines of a function in New Delhi.
Sixtyeight people were killed when bombs were set off in two coaches of cross-country Samjhauta (…)

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” —Shelley
I
Shelley was never more wrong, but to that I shall return.
Currently, one of the “burning issues” on media channels here in India is what colour we may ascribe or not ascribe to terror. A conundrum, if there ever was one.
The matter has arisen from a comment made by the honourable Home Minister (read Minister of the Interior, incharge of “security” of the realm) to a conclave of senior (…)

Syed Shahabuddin, President of All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, has issued the following statement.
The ugly face of Hindutva terrorism stands fully exposed, alongwith its connection with the Sangh Parivar and some Hindu religious figures, as well as its tentacles in some sections of the Army, the intelligence agencies and the police.
Since 2001 several acts of terrorism were attributed to the Muslims even before completing the investigations. It is now clear that many of them were (…)