2020

The Editors Guild Of India
Press Statement
October 4, 2020
The Editors Guild Of India condemns the manner in which the law enforcement agencies of the Uttar Pradesh government, led by Yogi Adityanath, have prevented media persons from reporting on developments in and around Hathras after a brutal assault on a woman leading to her death and the hurried cremation of her body by the authorities without the presence of the family of the deceased.
Equally reprehensible is the way the (…)

A delegation comprising Annie Raja, National General Secretary NFIW, Poonam Kaushik, General Secretary Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan and Shabnam Hashmi, ANHAD visited Bul Garhi village in Hathras district on October 5, 2020

The Indian Doctors for Peace and Development (IDPD)
Date: 06.10.2020
The Indian Doctors for Peace and Development (IDPD) has said that India’s statement at the UN that it is committed to total elimination of nuclear weapons and reaffirmation of no first use of nuclear weapons and further commitment to nuclear disarmament through a step-by-step process under written by a universal commitment and an agreed multilateral framework is a welcome gesture. The IDPD has said that time is now to (…)

by Amulya Ganguli
October 5, 2020
The response of the BJP’s troll army to the Amnesty International’s departure from India showed that Islamophobia was not the only arrow in the Hindutva brotherhood’s ideological quiver.
There were also other projectiles which included animus against foreigners. Hence, the comparison drawn by some of the saffron netizens between the East India Company and Amnesty.
Like the predatory English outfit of the 18th and 19th centuries, the reputed (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Mr. Satyapal Singh, the BJP MP, while speaking in Lok Sabha on amendments to FCRA went on to support the forthcoming restrictions to the foreign contributions. While making his arguments, to buttress his point, he put forward the case of Pastor Graham Stewart Stains. In the process he poured venom on the late Pastor by saying that the Pastor had raped 30 Tribal women and was involved in the work of conversion to Christianity with the help of funds from abroad!
This (…)

’My mother was married off when she was 9 -10 years old. I was married off when I was 13 or so. I had to marry my daughter off when she was 15 or 16’, says Kusum (name changed). Kusum is a sugarcane cutter from Beed, who has to migrate every year from her drought-prone village in Marathwada to the lush sugarcane fields in Western Maharashtra. Kusum’s mother was a sugarcane cutter too and so is Kusum’s daughter. ’This is the third generation in our family who are forced to live this life’, (…)

News reports of increasing distress among farmers in many parts of the country in recent times have been accompanied by worsening overall poverty in rural areas, particularly among landless people. There has been more recent by opposition by farmers that the changes which the government is bringing are not along the right lines and in fact can aggravate problems. A big challenge is to find the right path which can not only resolve pressing problems of farmers but also reduce significantly (…)

by Priyanca Mathur and Roshni Sharma *
In the 66 pages long National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the word ‘gender’ appears only 16 times precisely. While NEP 2020 claims to have approached gender as a ‘cross-cutting priority’ the mention of the word comes up substantially only towards the end. The single tangible commitment from the government in actualising this priority is stated in the setting up of a “Gender Inclusion Fund”, ostensibly to assist in providing quality and equitable (…)

The recently launched new National Education Policy (NEP) approved by the Union Cabinet aims to usher in a new era of education that promises to make India globally competitive, holistic, more productive, and forward looking. This is the first education policy of the 21st century that replaces the thirty-four-year-old National Policy on Education (NPE) drawn in 1986. The policy overall looks quite ambitious and futuristic but much of its success will depend on what it proposes to achieve. (…)

How does one make sense of a still-nascent democracy that has been rapidly hijacked by majoritarian chauvinists, forcing its minorities into siege-like conditions; a situation where social, economic, and political predicaments continue to feed upon and strengthen each other in a noxious symbiosis, while those who struggle are at a loss on how to find their way out of this imbroglio? It is a crucial challenge of our times to understand how the RSS can be prevented from using problems within (…)