2021

The whole thrust of the RSS-BJP election campaign for 2021 state assembly elections in Bengal has been to save Bengal from the rule of Mamata Bannerjee who is not a ‘Hindu’.
PM of India, Narendra Bhai Modi, a self-proclaimed Hindu nationalist, as usual set the polarizing agenda. While addressing the first election rally, he called upon the electorate to overthrow the ‘nirmam’ (cruel) rule of Mamata by showing a ‘Ram Card’. He did not name Hindus directly but there was no confusion about (…)

MUSINGS
28 April 2021
What is happening to the jailed population of this country in these pandemic times? What are the latest inputs to the health of the imprisoned? Are they fine or are they semi- alive, in the clutches of a collapsing system?
In fact, last week I was appalled to read the particular news report which described that the jailed ailing journalist Siddique Kappan has been chained to the hospital bed in a particular hospital in Uttar Pradesh. Many more traumatic (…)

ROSES FROM KENYA: LABOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND THE GLOBAL TRADE IN CUT FLOWERS
by Megan A. Styles
Culture, Place, and Nature Series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Illustrations, map, charts. 256 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-295-74650-0; $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-74651-7.
Reviewed by Gregory H. Maddox (Texas Southern University)
Megan Styles has written an anthropology of place based on the export cut-flower industry in Naivasha, Kenya. In her analysis, place stands (…)

One day I will wake and find
Suddenly into the Sky has climbed
The unheard-off day
The Never-ending First of May
— Charles Magde

What happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 did not suddenly reveal anything new about the ways in which men of power and privilege seek to protect their social order: the history of the last 150 years is spattered with such episodes.

* Kashmir: 8th Report of the Concerned Citizens Group
* Cry, Afghanistan | Apratim Mukarji
* Ganges water and myths of immunity from Coronavirus | Chetan Sinha

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 24, 2021
As the explosive Covid-19 second wave strikes across India, the officials and politicians who call the shots have been caught unawares and unprepared in developing the much needed medical infrastructure to deal with a large public health crisis. But our political leaders and the bureaucracy that runs the state seem not to be bothered. They are never in the wrong and their record is spotless clean come what may.
In April 2021 as India has (…)

15 April 2021
The Concerned Citizens’ Group visited Kashmir from March 30 to April 2, 2021. This was its third visit after the Narendra Modi government revoked the special status of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir and the eighth since violence erupted in the Valley following the gunning down of a militant leader Burhan Wani in July 2016.
The first visit of the CCG had taken place amidst the strikes, deaths and pellet injuries to citizens young and old, in October 2016. Since (…)

by Gyan Pathak
(India Press Agency, April 22, 2021) India has sufficient stock of oxygen, says the Union Government. It means the catastrophic oxygen crisis in the country is created either artificially for profiteering, criminal neglect of responsibility, or obstructing its smooth movement by design or carelessness. This essential commodity for sustaining human life is not reaching to all the critical COVID-19 patients admitted in hospitals causing their death in large number. It is a (…)

IMPRESSIONS
Two contrasting scenes of shame hit India last week. One was people dying in Ahmedabad in numbers the City’s crematoriums could not handle. Where 20 bodies were the norm in the past, 80 were arriving now thanks to Covid. Surat’s biggest crematorium used to attend to 30 bodies a day. Now it was forced to cremate 110 a day. (There were reports that the state government was hiding the true death rates.) A body now has to wait for a minimum of eight hours before it can (…)