2021

by Ronja Koskinen
Aug 12, 2021
Six months after the military coup, Myanmar’s journalists are still fighting to do their jobs. IPI spoke with Burmese journalists in-and outside the country to assess the threats facing the media.
Arbitrary arrests, torture, surveillance, economic uncertainty, exile. This is the new normal for journalists in Myanmar since the February 1 military coup.
Six months later, the junta has shown no signs of changing course from its crackdown on independent (…)

Reviewed by Jessica Lovett (University of Nottingham)
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REPLACING THE DEAD:
The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union.
by Mie Nakachi
New York: Oxford University Press
2021, 348 pp.
Print ISBN-13: 9780190635138
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Motherhood, pronatalism, and the role of women have long been popular research topics for Soviet historians. This exciting new book answers an important, specific question in this field: why did a regime, which was fixated on raising the (…)

Afghanistan: UN expert warns of “cultural disaster”, urges visas for the vulnerable
GENEVA (17 August 2021) – A UN human rights expert today warned of a "cultural disaster" in Afghanistan after Kabul fell to Taliban forces, and urged States to provide urgent assistance to human rights defenders, including those working on women’s and cultural rights, as well as artists, trying to flee the country.
"It is deplorable that the world has abandoned Afghanistan to a fundamentalist group like (…)

The Network of Women in Media
August 17, 2021
The Network of Women in Media, India stands in solidarity with journalists and all other beleaguered civilians in Afghanistan, especially women, as the situation rapidly deteriorates amidst the Taliban take-over of the country. We urge the Indian government to extend all possible support to vulnerable civilians and journalists, particularly women journalists, in Afghanistan.
Women journalists that the NWMI has been in contact with are (…)

We mourn with the Afghan people their double tragedy. The first tragedy---the US’s illegal and utterly unjustified military invasion twenty years ago---helped prepare the ground for today’s tragedy, the accession to power of the Islamo-fanatical Taliban. Condemnation of the latter must not mean any softening of the criticism of US and Western imperialism or in shedding tears at its departure from the country. The single most important democratic advance in the whole of the second half of the (…)

PEOPLES UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
16 August 2021
Press statement
RELEASE OF PUDR’S REPORT: ‘The Anti-Labour Codes’ (PUDR, August 2021)
The 75th Independence Day of India is practically the first for workers in the country without the official protection of crucial labour laws, like the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, the Factories Act, 1948 among others. Some of these laws are as old as the country’s independence itself, and all of them, in principle, aimed to safeguard workers’ (…)

17 August 2021
We, the undersigned, condemn the continued incarceration of the academics, cultural activists, human rights activists, lawyers, poets and trade unionists arrested in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case and unitedly demand their immediate release. After three years of media trial, harassment, raids and arrests of 16 persons, one of the arrested, Father Stan Swamy died on July 5th following wanton medical neglect in custody amounting to institutional murder. Those who (…)

* 25 Years of People’s Plan Campaign in Kerala | Jos Chathukulam
* Questions over Mangboilal Lhouvum and AFSPA | S.G.Vombatkere
* Independent India: Dreams Unfulfilled | Ram Puniyani
* Those Who Giveth, Those Who Taketh | TJS George
* Jamshedpur ‘Underworld’ and Changing Nature of Crime | Sajjad & Ahmad

We are again on the eve of another Independence Day, this time our 75th. On this auspicious occasion, our thoughts go back to our valiant fighters countless of whom had been martyrs while fighting the alien British rule that bound this nation and its people in colonial bondage for 250 years till its freedom, as an independent and sovereign country.
On that day, i.e. August 15, 1947, our first Independence Day Jawaharlal Nehru had as the first Prime Minister of this free nation declared: (…)

by Jos Chathukulam
This August 17 marks the silver jubilee of the People’s Plan Campaign (PPC) in Kerala. The introduction of PPC was hailed as a milestone in the realm of democratic decentralization as it played a significant role in fostering local democracy, devolution of functions, funds and functionaries (3Fs) and decentralized planning in the state of Kerala. It was also the most extensive and efficient decentralization program undertaken in India. The PPC has been considered as a (…)