2021

The widespread violence that was witnessed on Thursday, April 1, 2021, the polling day, at the Nandigram constituency, from which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is contesting, was anticipated and preventable. Neither the Election Commission nor the Union Home Ministry under which the Central paramilitary forces are, can escape responsibility for it. Mamata was virtually kept detained for over two hours at the Boyal polling booth which she had gone to visit on receipt of reports that the TMC (…)

A white coloured Mahindra XUV500 jeep (AS 10B 1022), owned by the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate from Patharkandi in Karimganj district in Assam was caught red-handed by people around for carrying electronic voting machines (EVM). This makes independent and politically unattached scribes like us deeply suspicious of the role of the Election Commission of India without the collusive role of whose higher-ups (with the ruling BJP to rig the elections) couldn’t happen. This highly criminal (…)

March 2021 marks one year of the declaration of COVID 19 as a pandemic by the WHO. And, on March 25 India went into a severe lockdown after a one day Janata curfew on March 22. The cases rose alarmingly till the middle of September 2020 and then mysteriously went down only to rise steeply in some States since February 2021. On March 25, 2020 the number of new cases were 121 and deaths were 2. Now there are more than 40,000 cases daily and 200 deaths. The contrast in the picture between March (…)

When religion is linked with patriotism, it can drive people to extremes. Not long ago an Islamist group in Somalia, the Al Shabaad, banned samosas in the country. The reasoning was that the triangular shape of the samosa was a trick to spread the trinity concept of Christianity.
We haven’t reached that level of silliness, but we have developed our own brand of extremism. Recently prominent citizens who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister about lynchings had an FIR filed against (…)

by P S Jayaramu *
In the midst of the ongoing assembly elections in West Bengal. Chief Minister Ms Mamata Banerjee has addressed a letter to senior Opposition leaders like Sharad Pawar, Arvind Kejriwal and the interim president of the Congress Party Smt. Sonia Gandhi, urging them to join hands for a united and effective struggle against what she calls BJP’s ‘assault’ on democracy and the Constitution. The letter is also addressed to M.K. Stalin, Uddhav Thackeray, Tejaswi Yadav and Navin (…)

The term ‘politics’ does not carry any single meaning. The following observations enrich our understanding of politics:
“The people at large exist in an oblique relationship to politics, watching over and asking questions of the political class...the people are indeed reluctant political beings who take to the streets once in a while and when absolutely cornered. Otherwise, people go about the business of life and living, and sometimes voting. But this does not mean that people are (…)

A well-known Dalit scholar Gopal Guru, presently editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, once wrote that “Indian Social Science represents a pernicious divide between theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras’ (2002). But Shudras did not get much attention in his, otherwise useful article. He immediately shifted his argument to the question of Dalits. Nowhere he elaborated his understanding of the Shudra question in a historical sense. Maybe this was a conscious forbearance. Since he (…)

March 27th, 2021
If the BJP seizes power in West Bengal, the political challenge for Sheikh Hasina will multiply manifold
The paradox is puzzling. Bangladesh is celebrating the Golden Jubilee of its liberation and the centenary of its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — events that evoke and reinforce the nation’s secular ethos.
As chief guest for the celebration they have invited India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, probably a natural choice given India’s contribution to the (…)

by Dr. Sajad Padder & Prof. Gull Wani *
Introduction:
On February 25, 2021 the Director Generals of Military Operations of India and Pakistan announced a joint statement which read: “both sides agreed for strict observance of all agreements, understandings and cease-firing along the Lone of Control and all other sectors with effect from midnight 24/25 February 2021”. It further reads: “In the interest of achieving mutually beneficial and sustainable peace along the borders, the two (…)

Press statement, March 28, 2021:
India and Pakistan peace activists across time zones came together for a virtual brainstorming session on March 28, inspired by the work of giants like Dr Mubashir Hasan, Asma Jahangir, Kuldip Nayar and Nikhil Chakravartty. On the agenda was the way forward for the movement, how to invigorate it by involving more allies, younger people and expatriates.
The meeting coincidentally capitalised on a rare moment in recent years where there has been a (…)