Tag Archives: Anuradha Bhasin

Culture, Debates, Democracy, Education, Government, Law

When Police Comes Visiting Bookshops!

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How saffron forces weaponise ignorance and stigmatise intellectauls

Silence gives consent

[Qui tacet consentire videtur – In Latin]

“Intellectual terrorists” are “more dangerous than cross-border terrorists”

These were the pearls of wisdom of the then Human Resource Development minister, who was addressing a conference of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (December 19, 2001).  Murli Manohar Joshi had even asked the ‘nationalist youths’ to counter ‘both types of terrorism effectively.’

…It would be 25 years soon since these objectionable remarks were targeted at India’s topmost historians, scholars, public intellectuals, even provoking followers to deal with them effectively’ like the way they deal with ‘cross border terrorists.’

Later commenting on these controversial remarks, the legendary historian Romila Thapar had famously said: ‘And then the government fell. But the books continued!”

Time for Thought Police?

As everybody can see, there is a sea change in the situation since the past more than a decade in this part of South Asia…

…..The target of attacks has now become broader, more expansive and more unpredictable. It is no longer restricted to ‘leftist’ ‘progressive’ writers, historians.

The recent move to ban 25 books on Kashmir history at a single go ‘for propagating false narrative and secessionism‘ — written by a spectrum of national and international scholars — which even do not share a similar world view, books which had been in circulation for years, even decades together is a case in point.

This list of authors includes, A G Noorani, Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Bhasin, Sumanta Bose, Victoria Schofield and several others… [Read the full article here : https://www.newsclick.in/when-police-comes-visiting-bookshops]

Culture, Debates, Government, Law, Politics, Right watch

Who is afraid of anuradha bhasin ?

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Attacks on the media have become more “sophisticated”, such as stopping advertisements, which adds to the threat of violence.

Anuradha bhasin

In the first week of October came news from Jammu that the government-allotted apartment where Anuradha Bhasin, the executive editor of Kashmir Times has lived for twenty years, had been ransacked. The act was allegedly perpetrated by the relative of a former member of the Legislative Council. The intruders tried not to be photographed in the act by Bhasin, but later she published them and wrote on social media about how her “jewellery, silverware and other valuables” were taken by them in “connivance with the [Jammu and Kashmir] Estates Deptt and some police personnel”. Bhasin had not been served a show-cause notice to vacate the flat.

Soon after the office of her newspaper, located in the Press Enclave area in Srinagar, was also sealed, again without giving its legal owner or editor any reason. “Today, Estates Deptt locked our office without any due process of cancellation & eviction, same way as I was evicted from a flat in Jammu, where my belongings including valuables were handed over to ‘new allottee’,” Bhasin wrote.

One is suddenly reminded of the various storms the oldest and most-circulated newspaper published from Jammu and Kashmir has faced all these years. In 1983, some 200 Hindu right-wing lumpen, armed with batons and sharp weapons, barged into the offices of Kashmir Times in Jammu and attacked the editor at the time, Ved Bhasin. This attack followed a news report published by the then forty-year-old newspaper, which had apparently “hurt” their sentiments. The grand old man of English journalism, as Ved Bhasin was known in Jammu and Kashmir, survived the attack and continued his work with renewed vigour.

(Read the full article here)