Category Archives: Debates

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Language

The value of undergraduate education for ‘Other’ students: Sanjay Kumar

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Guest post by SANJAY KUMAR.

We are a tired party after two days quick hike up to the base of IndraharPass in the Dhauladhar range. Half of the students are visually challenged, the other half have been painstakingly guiding them over tricky stretches of the trail. The bus for Delhi is three hours late. We are stretched over our carry mats, reclining on backpacks, on the pavement behind a row of buses at Dharamshala bus stand. The issue under discussion is Atheism. It hasn’t taken long for visually challenged students to split into firm believers who pray regularly, occasional/opportunist believers, agnostics and atheists. Arguments are both experiential and theoretical. During one particularly intense exchange an occasional believer asks a firm believer, “If there really is a God who is omnipotent, good and takes care of every one, then tell me why has he made us so that we can not see?” It is an old normative argument against the conception of God. Presumably Darwin turned atheist arguing similarly with himself after witnessing the pain of his infant daughter due to an incurable illness. Closer home, revolutionary Bhagat Singh gives a liberal juridical version of the argument in ‘Why Am I an Atheist?’ Believer’s reply is spontaneous, in a matter of fact way. “You know what, I find myself really fortunate in being visually challenged. Due to this I got a chance to study. Had it not been for this, I would have been selling sweets from my father’s push cart in our small town.”

Realities of life in a country like India have to be piercingly brutal for a talented young man to think that it is mainly through his physical disability that he got access to a decent education and moving out of a life of poverty. This note is intended to bring some consequences of such reality to the recent discussions on Kafila regarding education at Stephen’s College.

Continue reading The value of undergraduate education for ‘Other’ students: Sanjay Kumar →

Capitalism, Debates, Politics, Theory

End of Postcolonialism and the Challenge for ‘Non-European’ Thought

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A lively debate has been going on lately in Al Jazeera, following the question posed by Hamid Dabashi in an article provocatively titled “Can Non-Europeans Think“? Dabashi’s piece, published earlier in January this year was a response to an article by Santiago Zabala, Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Zabala’s article, entitled “Slavoj Zizek and the Role of the Philosopher”, was actually on an entirely different issue, as will be evident from the title. Zabala attempts, in this article, to read in Zizek’s persona and oeuvre, the possible implications for the philosopher as such. He dwells on Zizek as a figure who is at once a philosopher and a public intellectual – a role not very easily available, according to him, to academic philosophers.

If most significant philosophers become points of reference within the philosophical community, he says, “few have managed to overcome its boundaries and become public intellectuals intensely engaged in our cultural and political life as did Hannah Arendt (with the Eichmann trial), Jean-Paul Sartre (in the protests of May 1968) and Michel Foucault (with the Iranian revolution).” Zabala explains this rare ability/ possibility by invoking Edward Said on the ‘outsider’ status of the intellectual and by underlining the direct engagement of the thought of such philosophers with contemporary events. He says:

These philosophers became public intellectuals not simply because of their original philosophical projects or the exceptional political events of their epochs, but rather because their thoughts were drawn by these events. But how can an intellectual respond to the events of his epoch in order to contribute in a productive manner?

In order to respond, as Edward Said once said, the intellectual has to be “an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society”, that is, free from academic, religious and political establishments; otherwise, he or she will simply submit to the inevitability of events.

Read the full essay here at Critical Encounters.

Centre watch, Debates, Government, Politics

India needs a third imagination

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In a brilliant column in the The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta (with whom I have much to disagree about reservations) calls the bluff of the “national” parties who want Indian voters to be wary of the ‘instability’ and impossibility of a third front coalition government. This argument, strangely posing itself in a nationalist tone, is unfortunately also bought by too many left-liberal intellectuals and activists who don’t want us to get out the non-choice of the BJP-Congress binary. Mehta writes:

Sometimes an ordered instability can be more productive than a comatose stability. It is said that a third front leadership is unlikely to have a national perspective. But the cringingly desperate way in which the leadership of the national parties have put their own survival above any principle makes you wonder what the charge of not having a national perspective is all about. The third front will make foreign policy hostage to regional interests. In a way, it already is. But the source of the problem is deeper. Even a supposedly national party like the BJP cannot get its act together on the enclaves agreement with Bangladesh. Why blame regional parties? The third front will be fiscally irresponsible. It is a risk, but no more than a risk with any political party. The Congress squandered the best of economic opportunities in a fiscally irresponsible way. It is something of an irony that the only Chidambaram budget described as a “dream budget” came under Deve Gowda. And many states have shown innovation in a kind of pro-business entrepreneurial capitalism and in social sector schemes. Many of the regional leaders who would make up the third front are autocrats. Indeed, many of them are. But that autocracy is more visible because the national parties can use the state structure in a very sophisticated way to further their ends. But they are articulate and engage with their constituents. In short, the constituents of the third front are as much India and Indian interests as anyone else. [Full article]

India needs a third imagination, and by constantly being told that it is not possible we are told not to imagine it. This is the argument of, as Mehta puts it, the ‘entrenched elites’, to save their privileges. The fear of the third front, of the ‘regional’, needs to be fought and defeated. We see this poverty of imagination thrown at us whether we’re talking of Nitish Kumar or Arvind Kejriwal or Mayawati by people who will do not think it necessary to subject the Congress and the BJP to similar scrutiny. This bias against the “regional” is remarkably shared amongst a lot of people across the ideological spectrum. Their bluff needs to be called.

Bad ideas, Debates, Government, Identities, Law, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Sinful liberals and the war against jihadi terror: Manisha Sethi responds to Praveen Swami

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Guest post by MANISHA SETHI: It has been seven months since the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association brought out its report, Framed, Damned, Acquitted, chronicling in detail how the Delhi Police’s Special Cell implicated innocents – former militants, police informers, businessmen, and just ordinary, unlucky men – as terrorists. It is one of the few documents that lends evidentiary credence to the widespread sense amongst Muslims that they are being targeted in the war against terror. Apologists for the police and investigative agencies however do not tire of contesting its conclusions, namely that there is a systemic and systematic bias against minorities when it comes to terror investigations. What bias, they ask. As does our chief National Security ‘analyst’ Praveen Swami, who has stressed that “liberals are compromising the war against jihadi terror“.

Could such ‘analysts’ be echoing the sentiments of a judge of the Allahabad High court, who less than two decades after India gained independence, noted, that “in the entire country there is not another criminal force whose misdeeds can come anywhere near the list of crimes of that organised body called the Indian Police force” (All India Reporter, 1964, Vol. 51, 702). Do they mean, that our extraordinarily brutal police force is even-handed in its application of cruelty across the spectrum of our citizenry, and is not especially biased against the Muslims, or Dalits, adivasis and so on?

Continue reading Sinful liberals and the war against jihadi terror: Manisha Sethi responds to Praveen Swami →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Debates, Empire/ Imperialism, Frontiers, Identities, Law, Movements, Violence/Conflict

Gandhi’s fourth monkey: Suvaid Yaseen

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Guest post by SUVAID YASEEN: Incredible India is a land of promises. Amnesia and half narratives. Selective remembrance and deliberate forgetting. The national interest is incredibly important. And everything is allowed in this war.

Gandhi’s – the father of the nation – maxim of bura mat kaho, bura mat suno, bura mat dekho (don’t say evil, don’t hear evil, don’t see evil), interestingly forgets to say bura mat karo (don’t do evil). So, you can do it, and forget it. Gandhi should smile. And his monkeys can make merry.

Mohammad Yasin Malik, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front commander turned ‘Gandhian leader’ must know this irony very well.

When, in the early nineties, the guns started ringing, Kashmiris were told that they should leave the path of the armed struggle and have a peaceful agitation, and they would be listened to, by India and by the international community. Continue reading Gandhi’s fourth monkey: Suvaid Yaseen →

Bad ideas, Debates

On higher education in India: Saattvic responds to Thane Richard

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This is a guest post by SAATTVIC

Hi Thane,

I recently read your piece for Kafila, which was subsequently reproduced in part in the Hindu. I studied economics there as well, batch of 2006. I subsequently went on to read for an MPhil in Economics at Oxford.

Good on you for writing that piece. It raised lots of questions about our education system, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and share the same dismay at the dictation sessions from one particular professor you referred to).

There’s just a few things that I’d like to say, but before I say them let me say that none of this comes from being ‘nationalist’ or ‘patriotic’ in the slightest – just as you spent three years studying, working and paying taxes in India, I spent five studying, working and paying taxes in the UK, and I would like to believe that doing so has given me a bit of a world view of these things. Moreover, my area of interest is education economics, which is what my research focused on. Continue reading On higher education in India: Saattvic responds to Thane Richard →

Capitalism, Debates, Frontiers, Left watch, Politics, Theory

Partha Chatterjee on Subaltern Studies, Marxism and Vivek Chibber

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At the recent Historical Materialism conference held in Delhi from April 3-5, a panel was organized with great fanfare – an official panel by the HM editors – around Vivek Chibber’s new book Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital. This panel was billed to be a decisive refutation of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial theory, not only by the chief  theorists and organizers of Historical Materialism but by many other Indians – most of whom in any case have little more than a religious faith in ‘Marxism’ and understand little of Marxism and its history.  There was glee all around and one came across the hurried announcement of a Centre for Marxist Studies that was to host further events around this book against the demon that Chibber had apparently slain. After all, Chibber  was backed by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Robert Brenner and Noam Chomsky, all of whom  had  endorsed his book as the death knell to  Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial theory. The glee was to be short-lived.

On April 28, at the New York conference of Historical Materialism, the organizers made the mistake of inviting Partha Chatterjee (a representative of a spent force, already buried at the Delhi HM Conference!) to debate the new star on their horizon. The meticulous demolition of Chibber that followed, embarrassed even his most ardent supporters, who had hoped to see the redoubtable Partha vanquished in person. And Chhibber, let our marxist brethren note, is reduced to finally accepting that he is more inclined towards contract  theory than towards Marxism!

Partha, whose years of meticulous engagement with Marxism can hardly be taken on cavalierly by any upstart on the horizon, calmly tore Chibber’s claims to shreds. Many supporters of Chibber’s book have, in social media, glumly  described the 28 April event as a great setback to their cause…

Here is Partha in debate…

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life

The Golchakkar of Premier Institutions: St. Stephen’s College as a Public Concern: N P Ashley

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This is a guest post by N P Ashley: For a teacher, it feels strange to defend one’s workplace in public against the experiential remarks of an individual who happens to be in some ex-student capacity in the same college. “I didn’t like X’s classes” or “I found academic excellence in St. Stephen’s College a myth”  are statements that need no attempt to be disproven precisely because the writer, Thane Richard, makes no attempt to prove them in the first place. The narrative is anecdotal and validation is through “personal experience” which can only be countered, rather weakly, through other anecdotes. Hence, I won’t get into it. But there are certain methodological problems with the entire exercise, which, if not countered, will wrongly define the concerns of the readers.   Continue reading The Golchakkar of Premier Institutions: St. Stephen’s College as a Public Concern: N P Ashley →

Capitalism, Debates, Everyday Life, Genders, Violence/Conflict

Students vs. SEWA or Dalit Student vs. Dalit Women Workers? Student ‘Politics’ on CDS Campus: Praveena Kodoth, J Devika, Sonia George

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There have been reports in the media of an agitation by students of the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram,  because a fellow student was asked to leave the hostel  to facilitate an investigation of a complaint against him by the Self Employed Women’s Association, which runs the cafeteria on campus.  These reports and some exchanges between faculty have been circulated on the web / social media and has led to wider discussion of this event.  We consider it imperative to put forward our shared perspective as women activists as well as bring together our views as women faculty members of CDS and co-ordinator of SEWA respectively.

The student was informed in a letter that the action against him was until such time as the investigation was completed.  Media reports have portrayed the agitation as having been motivated by the victimization of a Dalit student by the workers of the cafeteria. Also it is being propagated that the student was ‘turned out’ of the campus when the letter from the Director required the student to ‘leave’ the hostel and refrain from using the cafeteria until the investigation was over.  Deliberately enough, the action was not to prevent the student from entering the campus.  We present here the context in which the student was asked to leave the hostel, the politics of the portrayal of the incident by the students as an infringement of the rights of a Dalit student and the larger implications of their claims, that feminism has been used to victimize students on the basis of caste.

Continue reading Students vs. SEWA or Dalit Student vs. Dalit Women Workers? Student ‘Politics’ on CDS Campus: Praveena Kodoth, J Devika, Sonia George →

Centre watch, Debates, Genders, Sex, Violence/Conflict

Taking Stock of the new Anti Rape law: Madhu Mehra

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This is a guest post by MADHU MEHRA: The Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013, more popularly called the Anti-rape Bill, is now law. The outrage following the homicidal gang rape in Delhi unleashed events that lent force to the longstanding demand by the women’s movement for comprehensive reform of laws relating to sexual assault. These demands were bolstered by the recommendations of the high level committee, headed by retired Justice Verma, that called for reform of criminal laws, police reforms, prevention and education interventions to effectively tackle impunity for sexual violence. With the new bill passed by the parliament, the law stands substantially changed. This article takes stock of the ways in which the new amendments re-framed sexual offences in the law, their significance and the challenges that remain. While being far from comprehensive, these changes substantially transform the way legal redress for sexual offences have been framed in the law. A few examples below contextulise the significance.

Continue reading Taking Stock of the new Anti Rape law: Madhu Mehra →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Politics

Of Angry Young Students and Education in India – A Response to Thane Richard: Aritra Chatterjee

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This is a guest post by ARITRA CHATTERJEE: In his response to the article by some students of St. Stephen’s College, Thane Richard has raised a set of questions about the college, about the students participating in the present movement, about education in India and students’ voice in shaping education. He is critical about what he calls the lack of quality education, of a system where education is primarily about rote learning and conformity to structures of authority; in such a situation the promise of a good liberal arts education remains a mere promise and students migrate to the West in search of it. He also rues the lack of students’ voice in the education system, rhetorically asking, “Do students have any right?” He welcomes the students’ fight against the oppressive regime at St. Stephen’s College but views it as a movement that is too little too late and even that in “the wrong direction”. I shall respond to his views at two levels – at the level of education in the country as a whole, and that of the present movement at St. Stephen’s College. Continue reading Of Angry Young Students and Education in India – A Response to Thane Richard: Aritra Chatterjee →

Capitalism, Debates, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Let us declare that a state of war exists

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“Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites.” Those are not the words of a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), though the film has that too. These words are of Bhagat Singh, revolutionary freedom fighter who has today been appropriated by everybody for their own purposes.

The most remarkable thing about Sanjay Kak’s new film Red Ant Dream is Punjab. Occupying more than a third of the film, its use of the revolutionary sentiment in today’s Punjab takes forward the debate on the Maoist and other resistance movements in India. Instead of getting into the debates around the Maoist movement in central India, the film makes for a powerful document of the how and why the revolutionary ideal lives in India 2013. Continue reading Let us declare that a state of war exists →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Debates, Law

Is there anything like ‘copying’ fairly?: Rajshree Chandra

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photocopy

Guest post by RAJSHREE CHANDRA: In the backdrop of the on going battle in the Delhi High Court, between publishers (OUP, CUP and Taylor and Francis) and Rameshwari photocopiers-Delhi University (next hearing 8th May, 2013), there are two perspectives to which attention needs to be drawn. The first, of course, is a legal one which allows for course pack to be compiled for dissemination of course and research material, provided they adhere to stipulated norms. What are these stipulated norms? Have DU, and its network of photocopying, infringed these legal guidelines or even transgressed internationally evolved, legally acceptable norms of “fair use”. Continue reading Is there anything like ‘copying’ fairly?: Rajshree Chandra →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Politics

Academic Excellence and St. Stephen’s College: A response by Thane Richard

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This is a guest post by THANE RICHARD

I recently read an article in Kafila – more like an angry, reflective rant – written by some students from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi.  To quickly summarize, the piece criticized the draconian views of the Principal of St. Stephen’s College regarding curfews on women’s dormitories and his stymying of his students’ democratic ideals of discussion, protest, and open criticism.  More broadly, though, the article’s writers seemed to be speaking about the larger stagnant institution of Indian higher education, overseen by a class of rigid administrators represented by this sexist and bigoted Principal, as described by the students.  The students’ frustration was palpable in the text and their story felt to me like a perfect example of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.  Except Indian students are not an unstoppable force.  Not even close. Continue reading Academic Excellence and St. Stephen’s College: A response by Thane Richard →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Government

Why Delhi University’s Four Year Undergraduate Programme Should Not be Implemented with Irresponsible Haste

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A Note Prepared at the Request of the Department of Higher Education, MHRD, Govt of India

Preamble:

Universities are meant to educate, that is, to teach students how to identify, understand and evaluate multiple points of view. Therefore, dissent, debate and argument are the core concerns of a University – they cannot be regarded as irrelevant irritations or acts of sedition. Debate cannot continue indefinitely, and must be responsible. But what constitutes responsible and well-considered criticism is inevitably a matter of judgement – it cannot be decided through assertion and counter-assertion. It is also inevitable that motives will be called into question. This is once again a matter of judgement, based on available evidence on who is speaking (what is their wider credibility beyond the immediate dispute?) and why (what do they stand to gain or lose by what they are saying?), and an overall sense of what is at stake in the issue. We invite such judgements.

Facts which are NOT disputed:

1. The proposed FYUP is the biggest, most far reaching change of curriculum in the recent (i.e., last 30-40 years) history of DU – it will replace every existing undergraduate course of study in every college and every discipline (professional courses & some other low-enrolment courses may be exceptions).

2. The first time that the FYUP was placed before any statutory body of the University was at the Academic Council meeting of Monday, 24 December, 2012. This meeting – to discuss the biggest curricular reform in several decades – was an Extraordinary meeting, called at 3 days’ notice, which was issued on Friday, 21 December, 2012 and delivered over the weekend, giving Departments no time to consider the proposal and formulate an informed response.

3. The structure of the FYUP presented to the Academic Council on 24 December had not been sent to the Committees of Courses at the Faculties or Departments, or to the Staff Councils of Colleges.

4. The Academic Council meeting of 24 December approved the FYUP with 6 dissents, including a written submission by the Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, specifically requesting that the University take more time to think through this major change, and that a detailed White Paper on the FYUP be prepared and made public to enable the University community to respond to it.

5. The Executive Council meeting at which the AC approval of the FYUP was presented was held on Wednesday, 26 December, 2012, i.e. the next working day after the AC meeting of 24 December.

Continue reading Why Delhi University’s Four Year Undergraduate Programme Should Not be Implemented with Irresponsible Haste →

Debates, Government, Scams, Violence/Conflict

Dismiss the Delhi Police Commissioner

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It is surreal watching leaders from Sushil Kumar Shinde to Sushma Swaraj make tough statements, one after another, on television. Statements about taking strong measures, the latter even demanding, as is her wont, death sentence to rapists. I felt like asking, do you even realize what the people are angry about? Do you even know what is at issue here? Who will you hang? Case after case, even after December 16, it is being revealed, suffers from the same problem: the refusal of the police to even register a case! What is the meaning of this high histrionics then, when you do not even have a culprit to punish? I am not even raising the question of the ethics of death penalty because that is a redundant question at the moment. Except for the raving right wingers who – like Sushma Swaraj and Shinde – have to make some song and dance about the issue merely for effect, no one else really believes that at the moment there is any issue other than the criminality of Delhi Police. Continue reading Dismiss the Delhi Police Commissioner →

Culture, Debates, Violence/Conflict

Debating the Attack on Presidency University: Pratyay Nath

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Guest post by PRATYAY NATH.

This piece is in response to Waled Aadnan’s post on Kafila titled ‘Because Presidency is an Idea – All You Need to Know about What Happened at Presidency University’ (dated 15 April 2013). Mr. Aadnan’s well-written and succinctly argued piece is not an isolated voice; it echoes a dominant way of thinking that has been noticeable among the various protests against the recent incident of vandalism in the Presidency University (erstwhile Presidency College). Let me begin by stating, like many others already have, that the vandalism that happened in Presidency on 10 April 2013 should be condemned in the harshest of terms. My discomfort lies in some of the ways in which these condemnations are being articulated in the public domain over the past few days. I would suggest that the majority of the protests emanate from a sense of hurt delivered to the idea of eliteness of the educational institution in question, which cannot unfortunately be supported because it tries to detach this incident from the broader socio-political forces of our times by sensationalising the issue.  Continue reading Debating the Attack on Presidency University: Pratyay Nath →

Culture, Debates, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Spin Doctors, Propagandists and the Modi Make-over

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Elsewhere on Kafila, we have published a 7000 word long response by Madhu Kishwar to Zahir Janmohamad’s open letter to her which appeared on 15 January, followed by Zahir Janmohamad’s response. Perhaps a few things need to be stated here clearly with respect to her ‘response’. It seems to me to violate every tenet of reasoned debate and argument and is replete with name calling and stereo-typing of not just the secularist ‘other’ [who is her real other, not the Muslim] but even of the adversary she is arguing with. So if Zahir is a  Muslim, he has to be X, Y, Z and has to be believing in A, B, C. Everything starts and ends in bad faith. But then that is what distinguishes Madhu Kishwar from others. She is in her element especially in relation to those whom she disagrees with. With her there can be no disagreement – you have to be sneered and jeered at, irrespective of whether you are a Medha Patkar or an Aruna Roy. I suppose these are matters of personal style and I shall not dwell on them further.

Let me rather, turn to some of the more substantive issues raised in Madhu’s response. Zahir has answered most of them but it seems to me that a couple of vital questions still remain. Even here, though, a caveat is necessary. I have great admiration for Madhu Kishwar’s battle in defense of the rikshaw pullers in Delhi and have often said so openly to her as well as others. However, I do know that it is possible to talk to her when only we agree, which is very rare. On matters that we disagree about, I have decided that I do not want to enter into any kind of an argument with her. In any case, large parts of her ‘response’ are like Modi’s PR handouts, served to us without any sense of critical examination. Therefore, what follows below is not my reply to her but my reactions to a set of allegations she has raised about whosoever is opposed to Narendra Modi – all lumped together in a breathtaking move of reductio ad absurdum, first as secularists , who are reduced to Leftists/ NGO activists and finally to Congress-supporters (because, she says in her Modinama1, the Congress has been equally responsible for all the riots till date). I therefore, lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am an inveterate Modi-hater (and a Congress-hater as well, if that makes sense to anyone in her dichotomized universe) and Kafila is a forum with a certain, if very broad, politics that, at the minimum rules out being pro-Modi. Continue reading Spin Doctors, Propagandists and the Modi Make-over →

Debates, Genders, Government, Identities, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

A conversation that didn’t take place in Juhapura: Madhu Purnima Kishwar and Zahir Janmohamed

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On 15 January, Kafila published an open letter to MADHU PURNIMA KISHWAR by ZAHIR JANMOHAMED. Three months later, Kishwar has sent us a response. Given below her response are comments by Zahir Janmohamed.

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Dear Zahirbhai,

My apologies for the delay in responding to your “Open Letter” addressed to me through Kafila on January 11 2013.

Unlike most of those upset at my articles on Gujarat, you have been remarkably measured in your tone and tenor and also respectful in questioning my observations. However, the content of your letter annoyed me no end. I kept postponing my response in the hope that my annoyance at the absurdity of your chargesheet would subside over time. I honestly did not want to give you an angry or discourteous response so that the dialogic mode you established remained undisturbed.

However, as I began processing the enormous load of material I had gathered from Gujarat, my annoyance kept increasing at your jaundiced viewpoint. Therefore, I thought of letting the series of articles I am writing answer some of your questions. I had made it a point to ask all the questions you raised from Gujaratis I interviewed. At the end of my first series on Gujarat I would have written to ask you if you got your answers. Continue reading A conversation that didn’t take place in Juhapura: Madhu Purnima Kishwar and Zahir Janmohamed →

Bad ideas, Debates, Government, Law, Violence/Conflict

Because Presidency is an Idea – All You Need to Know About What Happened at Presidency University: Waled Aadnan

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Image

Guest post by WALED AADNAN: On 10th April, 2013, an unprecedented incident happened at Presidency University (erstwhile Presidency College), Kolkata. Now, unprecedented is a strong term when it relates to Presidency College, because it has, over its 196- year- long history,  seen much. It has been broken in by rioting mobs in 1926; in the 1960s and 70s, it was the so-called headquarters of the Naxal movement in Bengal; it has nurtured Indian Nobel Prize and Oscar winners and consistently over its history. It has been one of India’s elite colleges and a hotbed of left-wing politics.

Continue reading Because Presidency is an Idea – All You Need to Know About What Happened at Presidency University: Waled Aadnan →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Debates, Law, Violence/Conflict

Sign this petition to abolish death penalty in India

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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL lists some reasons why death penalty should be abolished in India:

amnesty2

Inconsistency: Three people, Harban, Kashmira and Jeeta were sentenced to death for a crime in which they played similar roles. But they met different fates. Kashmira Singh’s petition to the Supreme Court was accepted and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Harbans Singh was recommended by the court for clemency from the President. Jeeta Singh’s petition was dismissed and he was hanged.

Flaws: In August 2012, 14 retired judges wrote to the President of India, pointing out that the Supreme Court had wrongly awarded the death sentence to 13 people. They called the execution of two wrongly sentenced prisoners in 1996 and 1997, “the gravest known miscarriage of justice in the history of crime and punishment in independent India”.

Bias: “I thought I should get all these (capital punishment) cases examined from a normal citizen’s point of view in terms of the crime, intensity of the crime and the social and financial status of the individuals who were convicted and awarded capital punishment. This study revealed to my surprise that almost all the cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.” APJ Abdul Kalam.

To sign their petition to the Prime Minister of India, go here.