Kavita Panjabi honours the memory of a South Asian feminist from Pakistan who effortlessly produced an ” ‘us’ across generations, contexts and movements”, an ‘us’ across “Kolkata, Dhaka and Delhi, Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi.”
Just read about Tahira Mazhar Ali passing away, feeling really sad, hence this short piece.
I met her only thrice, and it was like I carried her within me all these years.
The first time was in 2001 at a seminar organized by ASR in Lahore on the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bangladesh. She came up to chat after my presentation on the Mahila Atma Raksha Samity (MARS) and the Tebhaga women’s movement, excited. It had taken her on a nostalgia trip, and she said she remembered the MARS on a collection drive for the Bengal Famine in Lahore too; many, including she, had taken off the gold bangles they were wearing and contributed on the spot. Continue reading Tribute to Tahira Mazhar Ali: Kavita Panjabi→
An open letter from students at National Law University
Abish Mathew, comedian of the AIB Roast fame, performed at NLU Delhi on the 22nd of March for our annual fest, Kairos. Early in the show, Matthew cracked a joke on domestic violence, at which point, two women students who found the jokes to be extremely misogynistic, walked out, showing him the middle finger. The audience reacted with some tittering, and Abish Mathew fumbled momentarily, before resuming. The audience asked him to carry on and to ignore the protesters. In the mean time, a group of female students marched into the auditorium holding placards reading “Get Out, Sexist Pig”, and also used expletives such as ‘fuck off’.
The auditorium erupted in shouts of “fuck you guys” and the protesters were booed and heckled by the audience members who demanded that the protestors either leave or move to the side. They eventually did move to the side of the auditorium, where they continued to hold their placards up and attempted to interrupt him. Abish was greeted by a standing ovation when he stated that he was an artist and recognized the right of the protesters, and subsequently when he ended his show by stating he had overstayed his welcome.
It’s not often that India’s Supreme Court strikes down a law in its entirety as a violation of the free speech. But when it does, boy do you want to stand up and cheer. Before a packed courtroom, Justices Rohinton Nariman and G. Chelameswar, pronounced their judgment in Shreya Singhal & Ors. v. Union of India,, striking down, in its entirety, the controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act in its entirety. The full text of the decision is not available yet. But Justice Nariman read out parts of the court decision, enough to give us a sense of what is to come.
Wait for justice to victims of Hashimpura has become much longer.
After around 28 years of the gruesome massacre allegedly by the personnel of the much feared PAC ( Provincial Armed Constabulary) for its biased approach , the Delhi court acquitted all 16 accused on ‘benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused’.
There have been very few massacres in post-independent India which have shaken the civil society to the core and have propelled it to come forward and raise its voice. And the Hashimpura killings happen to be one such episode. One still remembers the words of the well-known journalist Nikhil Chakravarty who had visited the place along with few likeminded individuals and in his scathing write-up condemning the incident had compared the event with
“Nazi Pogrom against the Jews, to strike terror and nothing but terror in a whole minority Community”.
SOME QUESTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF MASS ORGANISATIONS OF CPI(ML)LIBERATION, CPI, CPI(M) & OTHERS INVITING CONGRESS, RJD, JD(U) TO DEFEND ‘SECULARISM, INDIAN CONSTITUTION, INDIAN NATIONALISM’
Janta Dal (United) leader Ali Anwar, in an ‘united’ program in Jantar Mantar on 19th March had a frank admission to make in the first 15 minutes of his speech: “Elections ki hi baat se shuru kare, to haan, hum sab milkar Modi ko harayenge” (“If we begin with the question of elections, yes, we will unite to defeat Modi together”). He was indicating a plain and simple ‘unity’ of convenience for elections, of a converging pole in Indian politics. He indicated: “Bihar assembly elections are waiting to happen.” He of course, remembered the theme of ‘secularism’ for the event and said, “now I will say a few ideological things” and did utter a few lines against the BJP-RSS.
Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on 19th March thus saw a (not very?) strange unity. Various “civil society and secular political parties, victims, artists, intellectuals” came together to organize an Exposing 300 days of Modi’s Rule program. Many of the organizers included mass organisations of the Left like AISA, AICCTU, AIPWA connected with CPI(ML)Liberation, and SFI, AIDWA, CITU, DYFI, AILU connected with CPI(M), and AITUC, NFIW, PWA related to CPI, among others. In these dark times of achhe din, where unity and collaboration of various left, democratic and progressive forces has come up with renewed necessity to fight the present regime, it becomes important for us to interrogate such attempts without any sectarianism. An important question that requires asking here is the basis of these ‘Unities’ and Forums being variously attempted. ‘Unity’ is definitely required in these times of combined attack of brutal neoliberal and communal attack, but standing on what ground, and in what direction?Continue reading While “Exposing 300 days of Modi’s Rule”, Let us not fall into the Trappings of Old Congress Style Politics: Nayan Jyoti→
A Work of Art Vandalized at Gallerie One, Srinagar
On the opening day of Gallerie One, I was in a conversation with Rajendra Tickoo, Masood Hussain, Shabbir Mirza, M A Mehboob, Shaiqa Mohi and several other senior artists from Jammu and Kashmir. The opening of the first ever centre for contemporary arts and research in Kashmir was a dream come true for all of them. They told me that they had waited all their lives for such an initiative and how several great artists had died with the dream of having an art gallery in Kashmir. They were all very excited. They shook my hand again and again and hugged me before and after. Continue reading Kill it Before it Hatches, Attack it Before it Grows – On State Sanctioned Vandalism against Contemporary Art in Kashmir: Syed Mujtaba Rizvi→
Sanitary pad with message against sexism on Jamia campus
19-year-old Elona Kastrati started the #PadsAgainstSexism campaign in her hometown of Karlsruhe, Germany.
“I thought about how society gets offended by a normal pad. I thought about it so much, the idea came to me to write quotes on them,” she says. So she did.
”in our religious scriptures ( Puranas) life of a cow is more important than any number of people” ( Puranon me insaan se jyada gay ko mahtv diya jata hai)
– Giriraj Kishore, Vice President of VHP,
On the public lynching of five dalits, October 2002
BJP Haryana chief Ram Bilas Sharma has promised to treat cow slaughter as a crime as heinous as murder. If elected, he said at the manifesto release function…
TNN | Oct 3, 2014, 05.06AM IST
There is a competition of sorts between BJP ruled states to fulfil what a Haryana leader said ‘ to fulfil Modiji’s dream’. Close on the heels of Maharashtra government’s getting clearance to ban cow slaughter, there is news in a section of the press that the government in Haryana would table a similar bill in the assembly.
Sharing few snippets of the bill and comparing it with punishment of other offences, a newspaper report tells us that if the offence is insult to modesty of women the maximum jail sentence would be one year or fine, if it is molestation then it would be two years or fine, for theft the maximum jail term would be three years, for assault it would be 3 months or fine, and for causing grievous hurt it would be maximum seven years. (Times of India, 14 th March 2015) and if it is beef in any form then it would be punishable by upto ten years in jail. Continue reading On The Interrelationship between Bovine and Human Beings→
While the Indian media goes ballistic over the possibility of a split in the Aam Aadmi Party and ardent supporters stand demoralised, for me this is probably the best news I have heard since the party’s historic win in the recent Delhi assembly elections. I love anything with ‘splittist tendencies’.
The reason is simple. For anyone even vaguely familiar with the nature of living systems, particularly microbial life (and this is a bacterial planet we live on) one of its fundamental characteristics is ‘divide and rule’. Let me explain in more detail, before Markandeya Katju accuses me of being a ‘British agent’.
Basically, anything that possesses life, propagates and spreads its influence only through the process of splitting itself repeatedly till it finds its true balance within the larger ecosystem. All of evolution is possible only because of the constant churning, that results in repeated mutation of basic genetic structures, from which the most durable and relevant ones survive.
Lifeless, inanimate objects on the other hand, by definition, do not possess any internal contradictions and can move around only when pushed by external forces. In political terms it is simple to understand this point – when was the last time the Congress, BJP or for that matter CPI or CPM split anywhere? If there is no opinion at all, there can’t be a ‘difference of opinion’ too. Continue reading AAP’s Divide & Rule: Satya Sagar→
To the question whether the Hindus ever ate beef, every Touchable Hindu, whether he is a Brahmin or a non-Brahmin, will say ‘no, never’. In a certain sense, he is right. From times no Hindu has eaten beef. If this is all that the Touchable Hindu wants to convey by his answer there need be no quarrel over it. But when the learned Brahmins argue that the Hindus not only never ate beef but they always held the cow to be sacred and were always opposed to the killing of the cow, it is impossible to accept their view…
B. R. Ambedkar 1
“Did the Hindus never eat Beef?” Dr Ambedkar has dealt with this specific issue holistically in his various writings and has also tried to link it with emergence of ‘untouchable’ castes.
At a time when the saffrons are keen to appropriate Ambedkar – who had time and again cautioned his followers about the dangers of Hindu Raj 2and appealed to them to fight the twin enemies of Brahminism and Capitalism – and present him as someone who not only endorsed the Hindutva project but also opposed beef eating as cow was sacred to Hinduism, it would be opportune to pose this question afresh before them. Continue reading Goodbye Secularism ! Enter Theocracy !!→
On 5th of March a mob of few thousands stormed the Dimapur central jail and after having dragged jail inmate Syed Sarif Uddin Khan, brutally lynched him while a gleeful lot clicked photographs of the lynching with mobile phone cameras.
Since the night of 5th March photographs of the brutalized dead body and a video of the lynching has gone viral on social media and activists across the country has rightfully condemned this horrific act of mob lynching. But most activists are under the impression that the outrage and subsequent lynching was because a Sumi Naga woman was allegedly raped by Syed Sarif Uddin Khan on the night of 23rd February. But one needs to understand that the outrage and the lynching of Khan wasn’t primarily about rape of a woman, it was more about how an outsider, more so a ‘lowly’ IBI (a very popular acronym for Illegal Bangladeshi Immigrant), has violated the Naga nation’s honour reposited in the bodies of its women by raping one of its ‘daughters’. Continue reading Nation’s Honour, ‘IBIs’ and the Dimapur lynching : Bonojit Hussain→
There is no way of discussing the ongoing crisis in AAP without being blunt and frank. The terrain of politics is, after all, a brutal and treacherous one. So let me put it without mincing words. The ongoing crisis in AAP is not just about ‘differences of opinion’ or ‘toleration of dissent’ but a power struggle. And before squeamish liberal stomachs start churning, let me also add – power struggles are not always only about power in and of itself. Sometimes they are, but quite often they have to do with alternative visions, imaginations and of course, contrary interests. It is only likely that every serious political party or organization will, if it has any life in it, be faced with a struggle over any or all of these matters, for what is politics if not about steering the party/ movement in the direction one understands to be the best course. And these alternative visions, imaginations, policies and interests are inseparable from the position of individual personalities involved. Individual ambitions are pretty much the stuff of politics and it is unrealistic to expect to see a politics without all of this. The will to power is not exactly a self-effacing virtue.
For this reason, factions and platforms are inevitable in all political formations and it is best to recognize them as legitimate entities and have open public debate, on matters at stake. These cannot be matters of concern to only a small group of leaders in the National Executive and Political Affairs Committee (in AAP’s case) or in Politburos and Central Committees (in the case of communist parties). So, if collective deliberations are important in the apex committees, they would do well to be preceded by a public debate among different tendencies within the organization. At one level, this means moving away from the party-form itself to the form of a platform or coalition, where the different groupings and ideological currents are honestly and openly recognized, as are the personal inclinations and angularities of each individual leader.
This longish preface should make it very clear that my concerns here have nothing to do with the usual liberal platitudes about ‘amicably and democratically’ resolving ‘difference of opinion’. A political movement or party is not an academic seminar. Every such struggle, in the final analysis, is a power struggle – so is the current one in AAP. And there can be no doubt that both sides in this conflict are deeply involved in it. Decoding the stakes in the absence of a clear public debate, apart from selective leaks in the press, is not an easy task. But it does not involve rocket science either. One can read the signs, one can read between the lines of the narratives from both sides that have emerged, howsoever partially, in the media. What follows below, though, is a reading quite different from the ones inundating the media about intolerance of dissent. Continue reading Reading the Power Struggle in AAP→
‘Our aim is to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science’.
– Avijit Roy
“Dr Dabholkar who was fighting against superstition was assasinated because he was a rationalist. All such people who have embarked upon a path of reason and rationalism, propagated these ideas, had to make tremendous sacrifices. Dr Dabholkar was not the first and would not be the last person who sacrificed himself on the altar of rationalism. This unending struggle between rationalism and irrationalism is going on since ages and it is for you to decide whether it needs change or not.”
– Comrade Pansare
Words, ideas scare fundoos rather fundamentalists of every kind, colour and stripe.
The mere possibility that a free mind can question, challenge and ultimately upturn the ‘ultimate truth’ the faithful have received through their ‘holy books’ rather unnerves them and they react in the only way they are familiar with. Resort to machetes to take on ideas or use meat cleavers to deal with unchained minds, quoting sanction from the same ‘books of wisdom’. Continue reading We are all Mukto-Mona→
When most tourists visit New York City, what they see is the New York that you see on TV – Times Square, Carnegie Hall, a Broadway Show and maybe a visit to the Legendary Soup Nazi. Our view of the City, though, was vastly different. As one of the authors visited New York for the first time, in the wake of cop killings of young black men in Ferguson, Staten Island and East NY, what we saw was the transformation of neighbourhoods into armed police camps, and a city torn by sharp racial divide.
Maybe our experience of New York was coloured by where we lived and spent most of our time. A tiny apartment on the same street as the 79th Precinct in Brooklyn; not far from where two NYPD officers were shot dead by a mentally unstable man in December 2014. In many of these neighbourhoods, the first piece of advice you got wasn’t about the coolest neighbourhood bar. It was: “On the streets, don’t run, don’t make sudden movements. If a cop stops you, keep your hands out of your pockets and don’t talk back. You don’t want to get shot.”
Avijit Roy was brutally murdered in Dhaka a few days ago. His wife, after heroically trying to shield his person with her own body, now lies in an ICU bed, fighting for her life. I was an infrequent visitor to his website, Muktomona. Visiting it was like running your tongue over that tooth you’re missing, or reflexively checking whether you had your keys with you in the morning. Its presence was a reminder that, no matter how circumscribed, the nation-state of Bangladesh still had men and women who liked to think unconventional thoughts; give expression to unpopular ideas; endeavored to stand, as it is, in the very edge of what the societal limit of what could be expressed, and then take another firm step, not back, but forward. Continue reading That Elusive Thing with Feathers – After the Killing of Avijit Roy: Abdul Bari→
Guest Post by Irfanur Rahman Rafin, translated from Bengali
[ Kafila normally does not carry poetry. But sometimes we make an exception, and we are making one in the case of this tribute by Irfanul Rahman Rafin, dedicated to Rafida Ahmed Banna, Bangladeshi blogger and partner of Avijit Roy, the Bangladeshi-American writer and blogger who was attacked and killed by Islamist thugs while the couple were on their way back from the Dhaka Book Fair. Roy wrote regularly on the Bangla blog Mukto Mona, and had written several books about religious belief, doubt, homosexuality and other issues. He had recieved death threats from Islamist groups in Bangladesh in the recent past. Roy is not the only blogger, writer and intellectual to have been attacked in this way. Last year, Ahmed Rajib Haider, another blogger opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, was hacked to death in February by a gang of Islamist thugs.
Hundreds of people have come out in protest against the killing of Avijit Roy in Dhaka. The killings of Avijit Roy and Rajib Haider mirror the assasinations of Narendra Dabholkar, and only recently, of Govind Pansare, in India by Hindu Fundamentalist thugs. ]
Avijit Roy and Rafida Ahmed Banna
Sister Banna, listen
by Irfanur Rahman Rafin (translated from Bengali)
I don’t have the words to beg forgiveness
But something still has to be said
So I whisper in your ear sister Banna
Seven brothers still stand by Parul
I know some will say it was atheism
I will say he was child of my mother
We will see if they or Nazrul was right
Those who claim divinity to take life
Do not believe their prophecies
Those who play games with corpses
The war began with bullets and fire
Bringing white shrouds to each home
In this land nobody’s life has value
I know blood flows equally for all
But sister Banna listen to these words
Even the hardest heart cries out today
February 28, 2015
বন্যাদি তুমি শোনো
ক্ষমা চাইবার ভাষা নেই আজ কোনো
কিছু একটা তো বলতেই হয় তাই
কানে কানে বলি বন্যাদি তুমি শোনো
বোন পারুলের পাশে জেগে সাত ভাই
জানি কেউ কেউ বলবে সে নাস্তিক
আমি বলে দেবো সন্তান মোর মা’র
দ্যাখা যাবে তারা নাকি নজরুল ঠিক
খুন করে যারা নিয়ে নেয় দায়ভার
তুমি বিশ্বাস করো না ওদের বাণী
লাশ নিয়ে যারা পাশা খেলে অগোচরে
বুলেট আর আগুন নিয়ে যেই হানাহানি
সফেদ কাফন নিয়ে আসে ঘরে ঘরে
জীবনের দাম এই দেশে কারো নেই
কোনো রক্তই বেশি লাল নয় জানি
তবু বন্যাদি তুমি শোনো আজ এই
দেশে পাষাণেরও চোখ জুড়ে আছে পানি
अभी पिछले साल की बात है जब जनवरी के मध्य में महाराष्ट्र के कोल्हापुर में ‘डा दाभोलकर की हत्या और तर्कशीलता/विवेकवाद’ विषय पर बोलते हुए कामरेड गोविन्द पानसरे, ने एक अहम बात कही थी कि अंधश्रद्धा के खिलाफ संघर्षरत रहे डा दाभोलकर की हत्या इसी वजह से हुई क्योंकि वह विवेकवादी थे। उनका कहना था कि
‘ऐसे सभी लोग जिन्होंने तर्कशीलता का रास्ता अपनाया, उसका प्रचार किया, उन तमाम लोगों को कुर्बानी देनी पड़ी है। तर्कशीलता की बलिवेदी पर अपने आप को न्यौछावर करनेवाले डा दाभोलकर न पहले शख्स हैं और न आखरी। तर्कशीलता और तर्कशीलता विरोध का यह संघर्ष आदिम काल से चल रहा है और उसमें बदल करना है या नहीं इसके बारे में आप को फैसला लेना होगा।’
निश्चित ही उस वक्त़ किसे यह गुमान हो सकता था कि महज एक साल के अन्दर शहीदों की इस गौरवशाली परम्परा में उनका नाम भी जुड़ जाएगा।
20 फरवरी 2015 को मुंबई के ब्रीच कैण्डी अस्पताल में कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी के इस वरिष्ठ नेता ने अपनी अन्तिम सांस ली। 16 फरवरी को सुबह जब वह अपनी पत्नी उमा के साथ सुबह टहलते हुए लौट रहे थे, तब मोटरसाइकिल सवार युवकों ने उन पर गोलियां चलायी थी। अपनी लम्बी जिन्दगी लेखन से लेकर आन्दोलन, संगठन निर्माण से लेकर रचनात्मक काम आदि तमाम मोर्चों पर एक साथ सन्नद्ध रहा यह सेनानी, चार दिन जिन्दगी और मौत से संघर्ष कर, यह जंग हार गया। इसे विचित्र संयोग कहा जा सकता है कि डा दाभोलकर की मौत और उनकी मौत के तरीके में भी एक समानता थी, मोटरसाइकिल पर सवार युवकों ने दोनों पर तभी गोलियां चलायी गयीं जब वह सुबह टहल कर लौट रहे थे। Continue reading हम सब पानसरे→
“Phool shaakhon pe khilne lagey” tum kaho, “Jaam rindon ko milne lagey” tum kaho, “Chaak seenon kay silne lagey” tum kaho, Iss khule jhooth ko, Zehn ki loot ko, Main nahin maanta, Main nahin jaanta
In Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Petrucchio declares the noontime sun to be the moon: “I say it is the moon,” to test his wife’s loyalty and obedience. As long as she stands by her reason and asserts “I know it is the sun”, she continues to be a ‘shrew’. Only when she consents to ‘zehn ki loot’ (plunder of reason), when she agrees to subordinate her own reason to the whim and diktat of her husband, and deny the self-evident truth, does she achieve approval as a suitable wife.
We, the people of India, are being similarly tamed of our ‘shrewish’ behaviour, with propaganda and public shaming in TV studios accomplishing the ‘zehn ki loot’. It is a process that seeks to bully us into declaring that the sun is the moon, that night is day, that ‘khula jhooth’ (open lie) is in fact the only truth. Refuse to part with your reason, and you are chastised for ‘bad behaviour’.
I would like to revisit the #GovtVsNGO News Hour show on Times Now, on 17th February, as a particularly glaring instance (Activism or Anti-nationalism, Parts 1 and 2 )
The topic of the show was the Government of India’s decision to deplane a Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from a London-bound flight, because she was planning to depose before British MPs about the violation of India’s forest rights laws by a British mining company, Essar, in Mahan in Madhya Pradesh.
Among the epithets, most frequently hurled at Arvind Kejriwal by the BJP, in the run up to the Delhi assembly elections, were ‘anarchist’, closely followed by ‘urban naxal’. What is it about AAP that threatens the Sangh Parivar to a point of exhibiting such great hysteria and anxiety?
AAP, despite some novelties, is after all a very mainstream political formation, operating completely within the ambit of the Indian Constitution and no pretensions of turning the system upside down?Is there something deeper happening here?
One possibility is of course that, in its name-calling, the BJP presumed the average Delhi voter would run scared, straight into the waiting arms of Papa Modi[1]. In that case then, it was obviously a complete misreading of the public mood of anger and defiance against established national parties. Continue reading Peace, bread and politics of AAP: Satya Sagar→
My piece (linked to and pasted as text below) in The Indian Express today, takes stock of AAP’s order to halt evictions and the possibilities it opens up to intervene into Delhi’s housing inequalities. I link it here in order to place it together with one additional frame that is necessary to the argument in the piece.
The counter to eviction is also a second object: a 25 sq m flat that is increasingly the primary choice of our housing policies to replace self-built house. This is seen as progress, an easily legible move from kuccha to pucca, from basti to flat. Complexes of these flats – often built in the thousands with a characteristic green stripe of the National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) at the bottom – have begun to emerge across Indian cities. Many more are on their way.
Who doesn’t want such a housing unit? It turns out, in fact, many people. Occupancy rates of units built in the first decade of JNNURM are as low as 30%. Why do families leave? Well, because life on very low incomes isn’t possible far from work, schools and transit. New housing units need land – far more land than the dense, self-built bastis – which means they are most often, especially in the bigger cities, peripheral. Far precisely from work, schools, and transit.
It isn’t just the distance. Housing decisions by the income poor are not made on the basis of the quality of a flat but on the ability to integrate housing with work by using homes as workspaces and living near jobs. This is why bastis are built where and how they are. Even if the new units weren’t peripheral, they remain a form unsuited to these multiple lives of housing: they can’t be incrementally changed and moulded into godowns, warehouses, tailor shops, or restaurants, or grow with families. They are houses, not housing. Moving beyond evictions will also need re-imagining the 25 sq m unit.
The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has won a spectacular victory in the Delhi assembly elections and will form a government shortly. The party’s manifesto 2015 (http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/AAP-Manifesto-2015.pdf) promises to do many things—some positive, e.g., passing a Swaraj Bill and some that are not so positive, e.g., setting up pithead power plants to supply power to Delhi. Here are a few practical suggestions that may help AAP and its supporters to strengthen people’s participation in grasroot self-governance.
Participatory budgeting
AAP’s proposed Swaraj Bill is aimed at strengthening grassroot self-governance in Delhi mohallas and community neighbourhoods. Mohalla committees are designed to deal with local issues. However, they can also be used as platforms for Delhi’s polity to participate in decisions that that affect all of Delhi through a process called participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting first began in 1990 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the first quarter of every year, communities hold open house meetings every week to discuss and vote on the city’s budget and spending priorities for their neighbourhood. Later, city-wide public plenaries pass a budget that is binding on the city council. The results speak for themselves. Within seven years of starting participatory budgeting, household access to piped water and sewers doubled to touch 95%. Roads, particularly in slums, increased five-fold. Schools quadrupled, health and education budgets trebled. Tax evasion fell as people saw their money at work. People used computer kiosks to feed communicate suggestions to the city council’s website.
Participatory budgeting is now being done in 1,500 towns around the world—Europe, South America, Canada, India—Pune, Bengaluru, Mysore and Hiware Bazar in Maharashtra. Twenty five years ago, Hiware Bazar was like any other drought-prone village in Marathwada. Today its income has increased twenty-fold and poverty has all but disappeared. Continue reading AAP Victory and Some Tools for Popular Self-Government: Sagar Dhara→
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 