Government, Politics, Violence/Conflict

जेल डायरी: अरुण फेरेरा

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Guest post by ARUN FERREIRA

Translated from English by Anil Mishra

नागपुर जेल की उच्च–सुरक्षित परिसीमा में स्थित अंडा बैरक बग़ैर खिड़कियों वाली कोठरियों का एक समूह है। अंडा के प्रवेश–द्वार से दूसरी अधिकतर अन्य कोठरियों में जाने के लिए लोहे के पाँच दरवाज़ों, [और पैदल] एक संकरा गलियारा पार करना होता है। अंडा के भीतर कई अलग अहाते हैं। हरेक अहाते में कुछ कोठरियाँ हैं, और हर पहली कोठरी दूसरी से सावधानीपूर्वक अलगाई गई है। कोठरियों में बहुत कम रोशनी होती है और आप यहाँ कोई पेड़ नहीं देख सकते। आप यहाँ से आसमान तक नहीं देख सकते हैं। मुख्य निगरानी टॉवर के ठीक ऊपर से अहाते में एक बड़ा भारी, ठोस अंडा हवा में लटकता रहता है। लेकिन इसमें (और अन्य अडों में) एक बड़ा फ़र्क़ है। इसे तोड़कर खोलना असंभव है। बल्कि, यह क़ैदियों (के हौसलों) को तोड़ने के लिए बनाया गया है।

 अंडा वो जगह है जहाँ सबसे ज़्यादा बेलगाम क़ैदियों को, अनुशासनात्मक क़ायदों के उल्लंघन करने की सज़ा के लिए क़ैद किया जाता है। नागपुर जेल के अन्य हिस्से इतने ज़्यादा सख़्त नहीं है। अधिकतर क़ैदी पंखे और टीवी वाली बैरकों में रखे जाते हैं। बैरकों में, दिन के पहर काफ़ी इत्मिनान वाले, यहाँ तक कि आरामतलब भी हो सकते हैं। लेकिन अंडा में, कोठरी के दरवाज़े ही हवा के आने जाने का एकमात्र ज़रिया है, और ये भी कुछ ख़ास आरामदायक नहीं, क्योंकि ये किसी खुले प्रांगण में नहीं, एक ढंके–मुंदे गलियारे में खुलता है। Continue reading जेल डायरी: अरुण फेरेरा →

Capitalism, Debates, Excavation, Metropolis

Olympics, Art and the Orbit of Capital : Anirban Gupta Nigam

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Guest post by ANIRBAN GUPTA NIGAM

The facts:

In 1992,  Prijedor – a mine in a place called Omarska in Bosnia – was transformed into a concentration camp by Bosnian Serb forces. The number of Bosnian and Croat people held in the camp varies between at least 3,334 and 5000-7000. Many of them – around 700-800 by some accounts, many thousands by others – were murdered.

A little over a decade later, in 2004, the world’s largest steel producing company, ArcelorMittal took control of 51% of the Ljubija mining complex, of which the mine of Omarska is a part. In the former concentration camp where thousands had been detained and many brutally killed, mining activity has now resumed. A year later – 2005 – ArcelorMittal promised it would financially back and oversee the construction of a memorial for the victims at Omarska. They never did. Not only that, according to some reports ArcelorMittal recently enclosed the space around the mine, denying people entrance and effectively privatising a place of great trauma and violence for exclusive reasons of commerce.

Meanwhile the company, through the artistic prowess of Anish Kapoor, spearheaded the construction of a massive public art monument meant to become one of the symbols of the forthcoming London Olympics. The Olympic Tower – also known as the ArcelorMittal Orbit – has, from its very beginning, been subject to both massive criticism and support. The back and forth over its status as genuinely “great art” or “fascistic gigantism” and a “waste of public money,” has centred on how people respond to the physical structure, as well as on the merits and demerits of having a large corporate house direct a public art initiative of this kind. On the 14th of April this year, Mladen Jelača, Director of ArcelorMittal in Prijedor, verified to Milica Tomic (from the Monument Group in Belgrade) and Eyal Weizman (professor in Goldsmiths, University of London) that iron from the same ore that was mined in Omarska had indeed been used in the construction of the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

Continue reading Olympics, Art and the Orbit of Capital : Anirban Gupta Nigam →

Bad ideas

Girls, Science and Sexism

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Thanks to friends on feministsindia list for these links. The first is a how-not-to and the second, an alternative vision – essentially, just pictures of women actually doing science!

EU made this demeaning and sexist video to encourage women to do science. Take a look at the outraged comments that follow from women scientists.  It was taken down from their website after the negative feedback they received.

(Courtesy Sangeeta Chatterji)

 

And the alternative:

Girls Doing Science via the blog Feminist Philosophers

(Courtesy Sana Contractor)

Excavation, Left watch, Politics, Theory

MEGA, the recovery of Marx and Marxian path: Sankar Ray

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Guest post by SANKAR RAY

In sharp contrast to the scenario of the unprecedented debt-driven crisis of neo-liberal world economic order, a new era of radiant expectations seems to open up for Marx-followers and Marxists around the international project, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (MEGA) and it’s hitherto ‘unexplored Marx’. MEGA , a collation of original texts is ‘the historical-critical edition of works of Marx and Engels’, an imperative ignored during the 20th century by official Marxists. Fifty-nine out of 114 volumes , have already been published. The MEGA editorial board, following prolonged debate decided to put together the whole of 164 volumes of original manuscripts in 114 volumes.

A critical approach to history  is essential for scholarly inquiry. Yet  scholarship alone isn’t enough where an enterprise such as this is for it also requires unbiased collation and editing. The development of Marxist studies had been throttled due to widespread vulgarisation which had dominated Marx studies from the 1890s to the end of the 20th Century. Early Marxists like Franz Mehring and Vera Zasulich – and Rosa Luxemburg – adopted a more critical approach which is a essential for the ‘Marxist temper’. Marx’s prescription, de omnibus dubitandum (doubt everything), wasn’t meant to be just a quotation. Unfortunately, Lenin and his followers often deified Marx. Lenin’s words – “Marxism is omnipotent, because it is true” – is one such instance as if Marxism represents the end of philosophy. Continue reading MEGA, the recovery of Marx and Marxian path: Sankar Ray →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Countryside, Culture, Ecology/Environment, Identities, Images, Media politics, Technology

Creating Happiness – Rijul Kochhar

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Guest post by RIJUL KOCHHAR

 

It is a minute and a half long, and from the moment you see it, you will know that there is something sinister about it—a scenario of forced forgetfulness. It is displacement incarnate, and what is it doing, this aesthetic of obscenity? Is this retribution or charity, or retribution through charity, the developmental discourse of murderous sustainability through erasure? You will be puzzled and worried, harried and then it will make you sleep again in pious numbness, for isn’t the world—its deep blue sky and crystal fluid and cleansing sunlight, and bright flowery faces, its innocent time—just so beautiful! You will find that you cannot respond to it, physically, humanly, for it is not receptive to the organic. It cannot be mediated. It is a ghoul, perched to haunt and hypnotize us out of the memory of its past terrors. You remember, lenore, and wasn’t it to be nevermore? It is an electrical transmission and nothing more, or is it? It is a triumph of pre-postmodern, oily chic, so cloaked in ancient blood, that the blood has caked and turned black and fallen off, revealing the identical colour of the master’s heart, now you see it, now you don’t. The laceration has been hidden by the three-day apoptosis—the extra-cellular matrix, the forgetful memory’s collagen. But you will need to dig outward and inward from here, and very deep. It is there on my screen, this light of blood-lust, “Vedanta: Creating Happiness”, and every time a new or repeated tale from half way across the world is beamed, news every quarter of an hour, this monstrosity accompanies those facts like some leech feeding on reality. You remember Sontag, and isn’t she who had her way with those words: “Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”

Continue reading Creating Happiness – Rijul Kochhar →

Countryside, Left watch, Mirror Worlds, Politics, Right watch

Swami Sahajanand Saraswati – A Contested Legacy: Manish Thakur and Nabanipa Bhattacharjee

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Guest post by MANISH THAKUR and NABANIPA BHATTACHARJEE

Observers of the political scene in Bihar would have hardly failed to notice a renewed interest in the life and works of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (1889-1950), the founder president of the All India Kisan Sabha, and arguably the most influential peasant leader of Bihar in the 1930s and 1940s. Over the last decade or so, his birth (22 February, 1889) and death (26 June, 1950) anniversaries have been celebrated with great pomp and show with full attendance of political luminaries of the state including Nitish Kumar, its present Chief Minister. Not only have glowing tributes been paid to his legacy but there has also been a spurt of writings on his life and times.

Swami Sahajanand Saraswati
Swami Sahajanand Saraswati

New biographiesi have been released, and his collected works been published in six volumesii. In fact, there is a Swami Sahajanand Saraswati Foundation based in New Delhi as well as a Swami Sahajanand Saraswati Forum on the internet. Curiously enough, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati figures prominently on the internet in the caste-specific web-portals such as www.bhumihar.com; www.bhumiharmahasangh.com and www.bhumihar.net where his name appears along with Bhagwan Parashuram, Chanakya, Mangal Pande, Sri Babu, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, C.P Thakur, and so forth in the long list of supposedly Bhumihar icons. Indeed, Saraswati’s legacy has always been the bone of contention between the Bhumihars and the communists. What needs explanation is the BJP’s concerted efforts in appropriating this iconic peasant leader as ‘samajik samrasta ke sant’.

Continue reading Swami Sahajanand Saraswati – A Contested Legacy: Manish Thakur and Nabanipa Bhattacharjee →

Culture, Debates, Excavation, Genders, Identities, Images, Movements

Satyashodhak – A Performance

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(A shorter version of this review appeared in Tehelka)

Writer: G P Deshpande

Director: Atul Pethe

Performed by Pune Safai Karmacharis Union

Image

It was apt that a landmark production of G P Deshpande’s 1992 play Satyashodhak on the life of the 19th century anti-caste crusader Jyotiba Phule was performed in a week that witnessed the killing of the head of the Ranbir Sena – a week in which we were reminded that the bitter legacy of caste haunts us as strongly as ever. It was unusual however, that the performance should be held at the recently-opened May Day café and bookstore in Delhi – a space dedicated to the different and more hopeful legacy of the international working class movement, and located close to the heart of a former industrial district in a city that practices careful amnesia about its working classes. It is entirely unusual further that the performers were both Dalit and members of the Pune Municipal Safai Karmacharis Union. While the ancient, poisoned streams of caste and class have often overlapped on the subcontinent, they have not, as we are aware, produced unified or even similar political responses.

Continue reading Satyashodhak – A Performance →

Bad ideas, Debates, Identities, Right watch

The Myth of the Muslim Vote Bank

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The recently concluded assembly elections in U.P were marked once again by an intensified debate on ‘Vote Bank Politics’. The debate was not provoked by the emergence of any new trends in political mobilization but was the standard fare that is dished out by so called commentators, experts, political analysts and people who not only think that they have inside information about how entire communities think and react, they also claim that there are agencies capable of engineering conditions that programme these communities to go and vote for this or that party.

The essential argument behind this discourse hinges on two presuppositions, one that particular religion or caste based communities can be mobilised and made to move in one pre-determined direction and two that this becomes possible because such communities react and behave as one individual and therefore all that is required is to catch hold of a handful of community leaders and you can as good as have the entire community in your pocket. Continue reading The Myth of the Muslim Vote Bank →

Government, Identities, Law, Violence/Conflict

Terrorism in India – Between Facts and Fiction: Imran Khan

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Guest post by IMRAN KHAN

More and more concerns are being expressed by human rights activists in India today on the question of fabricated and false charges on innocent people. When Dr. Binayak Sen spent his time in jail on such charges, activist groups all over the country and abroad came out and protested. For the first time in the history of human rights movement in India, around two dozen Nobel Prize Winners came out to defend him. It should also be noted that there were even protests against such fabrication in front of Indian embassies in different parts of the world.

However, with the arrest of Binayak Sen, the contemporary history of `fabricating false cases’ by the Indian state took a new turn. The arrest took place while Dr. Sen was a national leader of India’s pioneering human rights organization, People’s Union for Civil liberties (PUCL).  The activists felt that the message was loud and clear: That even human rights defenders can be imprisoned for no reason under repressive laws of the post-independent India.

Dr. Sen was released due to public pressure. But thousands are still languishing behind bars, waiting for justice. The nameless adivasis who were arrested like Sen from different parts of Chhattisgarh, speak of an unknown territory even to the best of our human rights activists. And new messages are given. Even journalists can be grilled. Thus, K.K. Shahina, Azmi, Seema Azad, Advocate Naushad Kasimji and others have become victims of attacks on freedom of expression. Fabricating false cases has become a norm today rather than an exception, according to human rights groups. Minorities, dalits, adivasis,  people’s movements and self determination movements become an easy prey to false charges. Continue reading Terrorism in India – Between Facts and Fiction: Imran Khan →

Government, Identities, Law, Politics, Violence/Conflict

False Charges and Brutality in Prison: Mohd Amir Khan

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Guest post by MOHD. AMIR KHAN

[ Mohd. Aamir Khan has spent 14 years in prison and was acquitted earlier this year]

I am in deep pain today. As though terrible, terrible memories, locked away in the deep recesses of my mind have been pried open. Heard on news that an accused in terror case was killed in judicial custody in Yerwada jail. That too in his high security cell.

I had read that the British rulers unleashed physical and mental torture on prisoners in colonial jails, but have never heard that they carried out killings of hapless convicts or undertrials in their custody. The naked truth of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has been brought before the world. But who will illumine the dark secrets of the netherworld of our prisons? Brutalisation and torture are routine in our jails.

I speak from experience, having lived for fourteen long and seemingly unending years in prisons in three states. There was a near fatal attack on me twelve years ago while I was lodged in the model prison of India, Tihar Jail. But when I survived the attack, a case was slapped on me. While I was thankfully acquitted in the case, not one of those who attacked me was charged until my father – who was still alive then—appealed to the court to intervene. Mercifully, the Court accepted his complaint and registered a case, which still goes on in Tees Hazari court. Continue reading False Charges and Brutality in Prison: Mohd Amir Khan →

Bad ideas, Debates, Everyday Life, Images, Movements, Politics

The (Auto)Rakshasa and the Citizen

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A petition from an organization called Change India invaded my Facebook wall today right before – rather ironically, it turns out— my morning auto ride. The petition is filed under a category on the site called “petitions for economic justice.” When you open it, the image pasted below opens. A sharp fanged, dark skinned “auto-rakshasa” demands one-and-a-half fare. The commuter is “harassed.” The petition that accompanies this image urges the ACP of police to create “an efficient system” so that complaints made to report auto-drivers who overcharge or refuse to ply can be tracked. How, it asks, can “concerned Bangalorean citizens” expect “justice” if their complaints are not tracked?  We all must, it urges, “join the fight.”

Image

Let me first say quite clearly that I do not mean to undermine the intentions and frustrations of those who launched this campaign and, yes, when the meter goes on without asking, it eases a morning commute significantly. The question is: if this does not happen at times (and indeed it doesn’t) then why is this so and what does one do about it? There is a lot to be said about the economics of the issue itself and I welcome others reading who know more to write about it more extensively. But this piece is not about that. It is about the campaign itself and how we articulate political questions in our cities. It is fundamentally about the easy, unremarked way in which a working urban resident and citizen – who is also, after all, a “fellow Bangalorean” and concerned with “economic justice”– can be termed and portrayed a “rakshasa” as if it were a banal utterance.

Continue reading The (Auto)Rakshasa and the Citizen →

Everyday Life, Genders, Law, Sex

Consent, Age and Agency: reflections on the recent Delhi High Court judgement on minors and marriage: Flavia Agnes

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This is a guest post by FLAVIA AGNES

I am responding to the sense of despair expressed by some women’s groups and more specifically to the press conference called by Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA)  to condemn the judgment of the Delhi High Court which permitted a minor (almost 16-year old) girl to marry the man of her choice rather than restore her back to her parental authority.  In their campaign for codification of Muslim law, BMMA has asked for laying down 18 as the minimum age of  marriage for girls (and 21 for boys), the underlying presumption being that all underage marriages must be declared as void.

Before we come up with a knee jerk response to the hype created by the media and bite the bait,  we need to have greater clarity on whose side we (feminists) are batting in this confrontation between  parental authority and the active  agency expressed by a teenaged girl. Also I wish to raise a connecting question — if the Muslim law was codified and minimum age for marriage was stipulated, as has been done under the Hindu Marriage Act, would the High Court have responded differently?  Would the judges have sent the girl back to her parental custody?  And the last question – could that have been construed as a ‘progressive ruling’ by us, those claiming to be “feminists”? Continue reading Consent, Age and Agency: reflections on the recent Delhi High Court judgement on minors and marriage: Flavia Agnes →

Debates, Identities, Violence/Conflict

Response to “In defense of the democratic struggle against Shankar’s cartoon”

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This is a longer version of an article published today in The Hindu. This version includes a section with illustrative examples that refute the contention of the petition that there is “inadequate representation of the role of Ambedkar” in the new textbooks.

At the end of this, I respond to the points raised by K. Satyanarayana and Anoop Kumar in their response to my article, also published today in The Hindu, to which I have linked below.

The petition against the Ambedkar – Nehru cartoon published in the Hindu makes for sad reading. Sad, because it bears the signatures of some of our best scholars, universally admired for their rigorous scholarship, who nevertheless chose to sign a petition short on facts. The petition asks the Thorat Committee to “reconsider the Ambedkar cartoon (and possibly other such insensitive material)”and urges “Kapil Sibal, the Union HRD Minister, to desist from seeking any major overhaul of the basic National Curriculum Framework on which the textbooks are based.” Perhaps the petitioners are not aware that the particular cartoon is now beyond the purview of the committee. A decision to remove it had already been taken by the Minister himself, and a commitment made to this effect on May 11 by Kapil Sibal on the floor of the Rajya Sabha. It was after this announcement that the parliamentarians intensified their attack and targeted other cartoons in all the textbooks claiming that they mocked and ridiculed the political class in general. It was in response to this outrage that the government announced the formation of a review committee to be chaired by Prof. S K Thorat to find out if there is any ‘educationally inappropriate’ material in the textbooks. Continue reading Response to “In defense of the democratic struggle against Shankar’s cartoon” →

Bad ideas, Centre watch

Qateel Siddiqi killed in Judicial Custody – Who is Responsible?

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This public statement comes via Manisha Sethi; see full list of signatories at the end.

Twenty-seven year old Qateel Siddiqi, arrested in November 2011 by the Special Cell for his alleged Indian Mujahideen links, has been killed in Yerwada Central jail in Pune today. The murder has ostensibly been carried out fellow inmates for unknown reasons. Qateel had been shifted to Yerwada only a few days ago after the Maharashtra ATS had taken his custody for a test identification parade.

Qateel’s killing raises several important questions:

– Siddiqi was kept in high security anda jail and not in the common barracks. How then did the attack take place?

– Could the attack have taken place without the complicity, even if passive, of the Yerwada jail authorities?

– Given the claim of the investigating agencies that Qateel was the key to unraveling the IM network, what happens now to those investigations?

– The fact that Siddiqi was to be moved out of the Yerwada Jail and was eliminated just before that smacks of a conspiracy. Continue reading Qateel Siddiqi killed in Judicial Custody – Who is Responsible? →

Centre watch, Empire/ Imperialism, Government, Technology

Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of India

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Dear Government of India,

We are Anonymous. It has come to our attention that you have blocked filesharing websites in India. We also know you are in the process of making a Great Indian Firewall, to censor the internet in India. Anonymous believes, however, that pursuing this direction is a sad mistake on your behalf. Not only does it reveal the fact that you do not seem to understand the present-day political and technological reality, we also take this as a serious declaration of war from yourself, the Indian government, to us, Anonymous, the people. Continue reading Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of India →

Debates, Media politics, Technology

Anonymous, India and the Blackhat Spectacle: Oxblood Ruffin

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Guest post by OXBLOOD RUFFIN

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Whitney v. California

Any discussion of Anonymous is problematic. One is never sure which Anonymous is being referenced: the meme, the group as a whole, or an individual operation. And the press doesn’t appear to know or care. It has gone into a rapturous fap over the loose knit collective, declaring them, inter alia, the most influential group in the world, terrorists, and – wait for it – very dangerous hackers. This last descriptor is particularly amusing. There are, in fact, so few real hackers within Anonymous that they could petition the U.N. as an endangered species.
Continue reading Anonymous, India and the Blackhat Spectacle: Oxblood Ruffin →

Bad ideas, Everyday Life, Identities, Law

Disability Law Violations in Delhi University admissions – notes from the margins: Rijul Kochhar

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Guest post by RIJUL KOCHHAR

Contrary to what they may tell you, they don’t really give a damn about the disabled in this country. Systemically flouted laws, polite terms substituted for impolite realities, and stony silences meted to those who seek to question—these comprise the working of the disability model in this nation, a model that only goes so far as the abundance of obligation and ‘feel-good’ eye-wash will take it. The juggling of words—‘disabled’ for handicapped, then annihilation of ‘crippled’, and finally that awful phrase regnant in contemporary fashionable use, ‘differently/specially-abled’—constitutes our single biggest achievement as far as dealing with the disabled as rights-bearing persons is concerned. Continue reading Disability Law Violations in Delhi University admissions – notes from the margins: Rijul Kochhar →

Capitalism, Media politics

कॉरपोरेट और मीडिया का नया खेल: विनीत कुमार

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आदित्य बिड़ला समूह ने इंडिया टुडे, बिजनेस टुडे जैसी पत्रिकाएं प्रकाशित करने वाली कंपनी लिविंग मीडिया इंडिया के साढ़े सत्ताईस फीसद शेयर खरीद लिए हैं। इसकी बदौलत टीवी टुडे नेटवर्क, जिसका 57.46 फीसद लिविंग मीडिया के पास था और उस पर मालिकाना हक अरुण पुरी का ही है, अब उसमें भी आदित्य बिड़ला समूह का व्यावसायिक दखल हो गया है।

Continue reading कॉरपोरेट और मीडिया का नया खेल: विनीत कुमार →

Debates, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Cartoon controversy – In conversation with Satyanarayana: Sharmila Rege

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Guest post by SHARMILA REGE

Satyanarayana’s interview addresses the crucial issue of a sharp division between the dalit and the left/liberal viewpoint on the NCERT textbook cartoon controversy. Clearly, Satyanarayana’s foregrounding of this difference is not a denial of the differences between the positions taken by dalit intellectuals in this debate. Further, Satyanarayana is referring not just to responses by dalit academicians but to the presence of critical viewpoints in the larger dalit public sphere – the very perspective/viewpoints that Liberal/Left/feminists have in a sense not seriously engaged with, equating them to ‘manipulations by opportunistic dalit leadership’ or /and ‘always and already emotional iconisation of Ambedkar’.  In fact, despite   important differences between the arguments put forth by Satyanarayana, Gopal Guru, Anoop Kumar, Harish Wankhede, Raj Kumar and other dalit intellectuals; all of them interrogate these hasty conclusions about irrational or manoeuvred dalit publics. Gopal Guru  contends   that the controversy has created a field of power in which even the supporters of Ambedkar and Dalits have ended up reproducing the compounded insult  through two assumptions –that Ambedkar belongs to the dalits and that dalits are pathologically emotional and thus not capable of rational independent views.

Continue reading Cartoon controversy – In conversation with Satyanarayana: Sharmila Rege →

Culture

A Pilgrimage to Ajmer: Kaveri Gill

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Guest post by KAVERI GILL

There is no point living in India if one cannot make spontaneous journeys, of all kinds and in all directions, for there is scarcely another country in which one can move so seamlessly and rapidly between such different worlds, both literal and metaphorical. It is the great charm of not residing in the bosom of the capitalised, industrialised west, with its clockwork uniform comforts. So when the serendipitous sighting of a photo of Ajmer Sharif, all lit up for Urs – celebrating the death anniversary of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti, in this case – prompted a yearning to be there, I decided for once to ignore the rational self with all its programmed misgivings, and just go. Continue reading A Pilgrimage to Ajmer: Kaveri Gill →

Centre watch, Government, Law, Movements

India must deliver on its repeated commitments to the human rights council: Amnesty International

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This release was put out by AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL on 1 June

On 24 May 2012, India’s human rights record came under renewed international scrutiny during its second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council. Amnesty International welcomes the recommendations made to India by the reviewing states, many of which reflect concerns raised previously by the organization.

Amnesty International is disappointed, however, that despite India’s assertion that it sees the UPR mechanism as one of “constructive engagement,” the government did not immediately accept any of the recommendations made, some of which were put forward in 2008 during India’s first UPR. Amnesty International urges India to demonstrate by September 2012, a genuine resolve to deliver on its outstanding human rights commitments and the UPR recommendations, when the report on India’s second UPR is formally adopted at the 21st session of the Human Rights Council. Continue reading India must deliver on its repeated commitments to the human rights council: Amnesty International →

DISSENT, DEBATE, CREATE