2019

by Binoy Viswam
Campuses all over the world have been breeding grounds of ideas and activism. How can one forget the student activism in Paris that frightened the French ruling class in the 1960s? During the Vietnam war, campuses in the US were centres of the anti-war movement. Students in Latin America have waged heroic struggles against fascist dictatorships.
One needs to look at recent developments in the JNU from this perspective. The JNU signifies ideas, values and commitments that (…)

by Khalid Khan
The ongoing protest against the hike in hostel fee has again triggered a series of questions on the Jawaharlal Nehru University which is closely related to the debate on privatisation of higher education. The larger narrative around which the students are protesting, fall under the framework of the government’s role in higher education. This can be understood from the perspective of public-private debate in education. The continuous withdrawal of the government’s commitment (…)

by Partha S. Ghosh
Why choose the title of a 1963 American comedy to headline this month’s column? At first glance, the plot of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has nothing to do with what I am going to discuss. And yet, in one essential sense, it drives home my point. Just like the movie hovered around the madcap pursuit of $ 350,000 in stolen cash by a diverse and colourful group of eleven strangers, the 193 nations of the world today are chasing security and material success without (…)

by Jayanta Kumar Dab
Mahatma Gandhi, during his public career, advanced inter-religious cooperation. He found that necessary because the core of religious teaching is love and kindness. According to Gandhi, “All religions teach that we should all live together in love and mutual kindness.”1 Inter-religious collaboration can be instilled by promoting the observance of religious injunctions and by celebrating the festivals of different religions and through inter-religious prayer.
Thus, (…)

by Murzban Jal
There is a famous saying that when two fight, the third profits. The Brahmans thus divided the shudras and the atishudras and now are enjoying themselves at the cost of the shudras.
—Jotiba Phule, Slavery
There is a great need for someone with sufficient courage to tell Indians: ‘Beware of parliamentary democracy; it is not the best product as it appears to be’.
—B.R. Ambedkar, The Failures of Parliamentary Democracy
Alienation as the Terrible Future of India (…)

by Aurobindo Ghose
In January 2018, four top Supreme Court Judges in a surprise move, held a press conference declaring that “Democracy is at stake, and we have a debt to the nation”. Justice Ranjan Gogoi, as he then was, had also remarked that “independent judges and noisy journalists are democracy’s first line of defence”. Three of these judges have retired as judges, over a year ago. The fourth became the Chief Justice of India (CJI) on October 3, 2018. On the evening of November 25, (…)

It is detrimental to democracy when the Consul General of India in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty, asserts that in order to facilitate the return of the displaced Pandit community, India will build settlements in Kashmir.
This sort of deleterious rhetoric, when employed by diplomats and policy-makers, becomes the authoritative discourse of officialdom.
In the current prevailing “culture of fear”, such rhetoric gives further impetus to forces of bigotry and intolerance. The fear of the (…)

COMMUNICATION
After a long struggle of almost two decades two important laws for the welfare and social security of construction workers were enacted in 1996. These provided for a cess of one per cent to be imposed on construction works which can fund pensions, health and maternity benefits for construction workers and scholarships for their children. Thirtysix building and other construc-tion worker boards (BOCW boards) have been set up in different States and Union Territories since then (…)

by Inamul Haq
The following letter has been written in a competition organised by the Department of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat on Constitution Day (November 26, 2019). It was awarded the first prize.
Jai Bhim!
I do not know how to start this letter. As you are the father of the Indian Constitution, I have so many questions regarding my basic rights that are not being fulfilled. Babasaheb, you took a lot of difficulties in framing the Constitution, borrowing (…)

EDITORIAL
Today is October 31, 2019. It is being observed as the