2016

by Vikas Sharma
It is the season of spring characterised by the consistently blowing wind. You may say that the nation is blowing in the wind of nationalism and anti-nationalism. A recent action against a public educational institution by the govern-ment has now turned into a storm. I believe that the contemporary time is not merely about a debate between nationalism and anti-nationalism. It is about the conflicting/contradictory ideas of Hindutva and Hindustan. Hindutva on the one hand is (…)

by Vijay Kumar
The slapping of the charge of sedition under Section 124(A) of the IPC on Kanhaiya, the President of the JNU Students’ Union, has extremely grave implications for democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism. The foisting of the sedition charge followed by assault on Kanhaiya, his lawyers, including the panel of eminent senior lawyers deputed to inspect the situation by the Supreme Court, and the journalists including women scribes, when he was produced in the court, have a (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Acid Test for Mulayam
Varanasi and Kanpur are the danger signals which Mulayam Singh Yadav can hardly afford to underplay. The significant impact that was made on the Indian political scene by his victory in the December elections along with his allies, ousting the BJP in office from the key State of Uttar Pradesh, would be grievously dissipated if his government is shown up as incompetent to govern.
The very character of the support that Mulayam Singh’s Government (…)

Women of Shingnapur Led by Trupti Desai, you marched On Shani Shingnapur as did the women Of Paris on Versaille—to level Yet another edifice of demeaning Prejudice. Knowing that it is not The mute, untouchable stone that Made you untouchable, but The proprietership of those who The gods of their making own. Wretchedly, they hide behind The ignorant rage of other women Whom they have made imbecile Mannequins on a cunning stage. However that be, know that on Republic Day of twenty sixteen, (…)

by Probal Dasgupta
Does Rohith Vemula’s suicide note make charges that can serve as the basis for judicial action against individuals who drove him to his death? This question has been under intense public discussion. There have also been claims that he was not a Dalit. Those claims are easy to refute: it is verifiable that his mother Radhika, who belongs to the Mala caste (an SC community), divorced her Vaddera (OBC) husband in 1990 and brought Rohith up in a Mala neighbourhood in Guntur. (…)

by Murzban Jal
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degra-dation, at the opposite pole. Karl Marx
At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in (…)

by Dwijen Bose
The BJP leaders from Prime Minister down-wards are unsparing in their criticism of the Congress. But paradoxically the NDA Govern-ment is following almost all the major policies of the UPA Government, including its economic policy of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and its foreign policy of widening and deepening India’s ‘strategic partnership` with the United States. Recently some reports have appeared in the foreign press that the NDA is engaged in (…)

by Sankarshan Thakur
Kewal Varma, the veteran journalist who led The Telegraph’s team of reporters in New Delhi through the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, passed away on January 25. He was 84.
Kewalsaab was a guru. Kewal Varma rings wrong, he was forever and for everyone Kewal-saab. For those of us who had the fortune of apprenticing in his shade, his passing is the opening of a void that won’t be filled.
I came to this tribe of ours callow and quite collegiate in 1984. Delhi’s Indian (…)

MUSINGS
State tyranny has reached campuses. This government is using every single ploy to crush any voice of dissent, to spread around an air of confusion, and to unleash terror. What happened at the JNU campus has layers to it. Foremost, it shows this government’s desperate attempt to shift focus from Rohith Vemula’s death at the Hyderabad University. It was a known fact that on February 23 hundreds of students from the different universities of the country would be reaching New Delhi to (…)

We, the undersigned, condemn the ongoing harassment of senior professors of Delhi University Dr Ali Javed, Prof Nirmalangshu Mukharji and Dr Vijay Singh in the name of questioning over a seminar which is construed as an anti-national event. These professors were kept in the police station till 3 am at night and have been subjected to questioning for nearly 12 hours a day. Dr Tripta Wahi was also called for questioning on Monday (February 15) but allowed to leave in the evening.
All this is (…)