2022

Sri Lanka will continue to boil until the Rajapaksa clan in toto goes. This message has come out loud and clear. The first month of protests, street demonstrations, encirclements of government offices and slow breakdowns of law and order all over the island-nation over the past one month have now graduated to direct action by the enraged people. And there is no end to all these because the Rajapaksas are not yet truly scared of people’s power. They still seem to be confident in their ability (…)

It is a tragedy that dictators never seem to grasp the reality until it is too late. Sri Lanka’s once seemingly unshakable strongman, Mahinda Rajapaksa, proved it yet again as he resigned as Prime Minister on Monday but not before creating more trouble that further stoked the fire on the streets.
The reality is that the shelf life of the Rajapaksas has ended. The tens of thousands who have taken over the streets of the island nation appear to know it. But not President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. (…)

On May 1, in the presence of heavy police force, demolition squads of Chandigarh swooped on huts and houses of colony number 4, Industrial Area Phase 1. The homes and hearths of nearly 5000 people, all of them from the poorest sections of one of the most affluent cities of India, were destroyed within a few hours. Many of those removed have been living in this 40 year old colony for decades and have never known any other home.
While this action would have been condemned under any (…)

by Mark Lindley *
7 May 2022
Gandhiji upheld and adapted to contemporary Indian circumstances a moral precept of “bread labour” which he had found in Tolstoy’s writings [I should mention the well-established fact that Tolstoy had found the idea in an essay by a peasant in Siberia named Timofei Bondarev.], and the precept is still familiar in Indian culture. The basic idea was that every able-bodied person ought to do some physical work in order to deserve (with or without monetary (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Culture is a fascinating aspect of our life. To understand the culture one examines the social life and observes multiple facets of life, food habits, clothes, music, language, literature, architecture and aspects of religion, among other. In a plural diverse country like ours’ there is a mosaic which gives us the understanding of the complexity of our culture. In India there is a heavy intermingling, of facets of cultures contributed by people of different religions. So (…)

by Gurjeet Kaur and Prabhjot Kaur *
Intensified conflicts between religious communities have shaken the country. We have been listening to news of communal violence from many places of the country like Jahangirpuri in Delhi, Karauli and Jodhpur in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Uttrakhand, Gujarat, Karnataka. Now the communal flames have also spread to Punjab, where two groups, Shiv Sena and Khalistani supporters, clashed. Communal violence is not a recent phenomenon in Indian (…)

The ongoing structural attacks through pedagogical changes will be catastrophic to the secular model of the Indian educational system. Recently, selected verses argues that “if the attempt had succeeded, we would have seen the fragility of the state-centered policy of decision-making in the curriculum. Indeed, this fragility can surface anytime, and the day may not be so far off if Hindu revivalism comes to dominate the state apparatus of education.”
Kumar’s prediction about Hindu (…)

by Garima Mani Tripathi
Food is the basic necessity for human survival. However, at times, it does migrate from an individual-cultural choice to socio-political platform, plagued by controversies and divisive opinions. The recent clashes over serving of non-vegetarian food on popular Hindu festival day in a Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) hostel is a terse reminder as to how even a basic necessity like food can metamorphose into an ideological agenda. However, many scholars who are (…)

(For Abhishek Tandon)
Allahabad, officially renamed Prayagraj in 2019, houses one of the oldest and largest High Courts of the country, retaining the city’s earlier name, just as does the Bombay High Court. The city of sangam was the last internal port of the country, and is known to many for the Kumbh Mela, a major Hindu pilgrimage. While talking of the city, the University of Allahabad merits special mention. Established in 1887, the fourth oldest modern university in India at one time (…)

PEOPLE’S UNION FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES (PUCL)
The PUCL welcomes the initial step towards the complete repeal of the colonial law of Sedition
Press Note
12th May, 2022
The Peoples Union for Civil Liberties welcomes the order of the Supreme Court dated 11.05.22 in the petition filed by Army veteran Major-General SG Vombatkere (Retired) as well as PUCL and a range of other petitioners challenging the constitutional validity of Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. In its petition, (…)