2020

by Debtanu Majee
The massive victory of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the recently held Delhi Assembly elections indicates that the citizens of India, and especially Delhi, are exhausted with the politics of religion promoted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the last six years. The Delhiites favoured the AAP over the BJP as it was successful in addressing the local issues like providing free electricity to families consuming electricity upto 200 units a month, air pollution, water (…)

The roots of the current crisis in citizenship jurisprudence go back to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2003, which made more stringent the possibilities of acquiring Indian citizenship by birth, descent, registration and naturalisation.
George Bernard Shaw had Bluntschli say in Arms and the Man (1898): “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.”
It is slightly over a 100 years since all of India rose in answer to Gandhi’s call against the colonial Rowlatt (…)

The recent Delhi riots bear testimony to a new paradigm of anti-Muslim violence. On the eve of the Delhi Assembly elections on February 8, 2020, a number of BJP leaders made anti-minority hate speeches, which reportedly prepared the base for the Delhi riots.
Reportedly, anti-CAA protestors, including women, had gathered in large numbers and occupied a portion of the road near Jaffrabad Metro station on February 22, 2020. The BJP leader, Kapil Mishra, gave a call to his supporters in the (…)

The lamps that gave light once with their steady flames wavered suddenly as the dark waves thickened and threatened. Their glow, shining up countless faces, dimmed all of a sudden. The flames bent towards the darkness.
The light mingled with darkness and disappeared forever.
The great betrayal had occurred.
I knew then I must burn my earthen hands to renew the heat whose light stole out with the ebbing spirit.
There will soon come other earthen hands to hold the embers, ready to burn (…)

by Sukumaran C.V.
In the first week of September 2017, I was in Gandhinagar with my JNU friend who is an Assistant Professor at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. He picked me up from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, Ahmedabad and while travelling through the city, I noticed a plastic mat was draped as a wall for a long stretch preventing our view beyond it and I asked my friend what was beyond the mat wall. He replied that it is a slum and it was (…)

by Swati Sehgal
The row around promotions and screenings of the recently released film, Shikara: The Untold Story of Kashmiri Pandits, speaks volumes about the social role of this creative medium. It is a strange dichotomy how a film functions as a medium both to bring to the fore and obliterate issues from the public domain. This latest work by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, released on February 7th, 2020 treads this treacherous path with the claim of narrating the story of a genocide that has not (…)

by Ram Puniyani
‘Go to Pakistan’ is probably the most-used phrase to target India’s Muslims today. Recently, Akhilesh Narayan Singh, a Superintendent of Police at Meerut district in Uttar Pradesh shouted (a video of the incident is in circulation) “go to Pakistan” at protesters at Lisari Gate, a prominent ‘Muslim’ locality of the city. “Those wearing black or yellow armbands—tell them to go to Pakistan,” he says in the video.
Singh’s seniors in the force have stood by him. They are it a (…)

in lieu of EDITORIAL
The following is the editorial that appeared in The Wire (February 26, 2020). We are using it here in lieu of an editorial with due acknowledgement.
For three days, northeast Delhi has been in the grip of armed vigilantes mobilised by Hindutva politicians to attack and terrorise those protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Given the nature of the mobs and their leaders, the violence quickly lost any pretence of a ‘political’ motive and descended into crude, (…)

by D. Raja
The use, rather abuse, of massive amount of people’s money by the Modi Government to welcome President Donald Trump in a mammoth gathering in a stadium in Gujarat spoke volumes of exhibitionism and utter servility of powers that be in India to please the President of the USA. The slum dwellers of Ahmedabad were hidden behind a long wall specially erected on the road on which Trump’s carcade moved. It is indeed painful that the Modi regime, instead of wiping out poverty, is (…)

by L.K. Sharma
February 2020 turned out to be the most ominous month for India. The national Capital burnt with communal violence as the police watched! The organised lawlessness killed and injured people, while the democratic rulers held a grand feast for the visiting American President, Donald Trump. The weird situation made a journalist recall the era in which Nero fiddled.
Trump adopted Narendra Modi as his soul-brother. He once called him the Father of the Nation, taking away (…)