Today marks the fifth anniversary of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar’s killing. The CBI on Friday arrested Sachin Prakasrao Andure, the alleged main shooter in the murder case. His interrogation led the to the detaining of Shrikant Pangarkar, a former Shiv Sena corporator, on Saturday. He was (...)
Five Communist and leftist parties in Puducherry are demonstrating against a festival dominated by Hindu fundamentalist and far right speakers. The local Alliance française in the former colony is hosting the event.
Questioning the decision of its Puducherry based affiliate to host the literary (...)
Konkan writer Damodar Mauzo says common people should rise up to combat the culture of fear propagated by right-wing outfits. Hindutva terror groups like the Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha and HJS operate behind a facade of religious fervour but their agenda is political.
Writer Damodar Mauzo. (...)
Online Harassment of Women Activists : in Conversation with POW Convenor V. Sandhya
V Sandhya, National Convenor of the Progressive Organisation of Women (POW), has been facing a recent spate of death and rape threatsfrom Hindutva forces. A member of the GroundXero team met her at her (...)
Not challenging BJP’s instrumental use of Hinduism for political appeal and dismissing all forms of religion as obscurantism is the political equivalent of leaving an open goal.
Indian secularism, Ashis Nandy wrote, is not the opposite of the word sacred but that of “ethnocentrism, xenophobia and fanaticism”. Unlike its Western meaning that stresses the strict separation of religion from politics, the dominant version of secularism in India prescribed equal respect for all religions, while (...)
Harsh Kapoor is the founder and editor of sacw.net – South Asia Citizens Web. The interview was conducted in June 2018. Andy Heintz– Do you see Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of a worldwide trend of country’s electing nationalist leaders around the world?
Harsh Kapoor – There is an (...)
By upholding the fundamental right of adults to chose their life-partner, the court has dealt a blow to all those who would use and misuse religion and tradition to keep lovers apart. In India, that includes intercaste marriage, interfaith marriage and the current Hindu social panic about a (...)
In abolishing Muslim mens’ right to instant (‘triple talaq’) divorce, India’s Supreme Court failed to consider the ramifications for the wives and children concerned. Some find themselves in a legal limbo. Can they demand financial support? Are they now married, separated, abandoned? Women’s groups (...)
Indian secularism is under attack. The BJP government cuts subsidies to minorities in the name of secularism but spends massively on Hindu shrines and ceremonies. Courts have tolerated this discrimination, recognising ‘Hindutva’ as a way of life. Progressive and liberal Indians forget how (...)
New Delhi, India - On a cold winter afternoon in the Indian capital, scores of writers, activists and students gathered under a poster of a blood-splattered pair of sandals on Wednesday, holding up placards that said, “Not In My Name”.
The protest came in response to the brutal murder of (...)
Mohammad Afrazul, from Malda’s Sayadpur village, worked as a labour contractor and lived with twenty-four other labourers in a four roomed, single storey house in Rajsamand’s Dhoinda, some 300 kilometres from Jaipur. He was first attacked with an axe, then burnt to death, and the entire process (...)
Twenty five years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, The Wire, through a series of articles and videos captures how the act of destruction changed India forever.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 and the deadly riots in the weeks that followed changed India. (...)
Extract from part three of The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism, Achin Vanaik’s proposed framework for evaluating contemporary authoritarianism and nationalism
Only the most rudimentary outlines of an alternative paradigm will be attempted here. From the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century, in all major zones — formerly the First, Second, and Third Worlds — there has been a dramatic rise in the politics of cultural exclusivism and xenophobia. Ethnic separatism or hatred have been (...)
We Won’t Allow India to Be Turned Into a Republic of Fear: Indians in London Write to President Kovind of Human Rights Emergency.
LONDON: Indian organisations based in the UK have expressed their “distress and concern” to President of India Ram Nath Kovind in a letter this Independence Day, about (...)
Writer and activist Amrit Wilson talks to Counterfire’s Shabbir Lakha about the BJP’s violence and the growing protest movement against the Hindu supremacists. Shabbir Lakha – We’ve seen a rise in human rights abuses and ethnic violence in India in recent years. Could you give us an idea of what’s (...)
NEW DELHI: When it gets unbearably hot in parts of India a cloudburst ends the long spells of suffocation and suffering.
The rain clouds visited Delhi all too briefly on Wednesday but they may have presaged the end of suffocation of another kind. Liberal intellectuals, worried teachers, (...)
There is a difference between Hindu and Hindutva just like there is a difference between Islam and jihadists.
This is in response to Rajesh Rajamani’s piece in TNM, The Savarna redemption: Why ’Not In My Name’ campaign is a part of the problem .
Rajesh Rajamani’s thoughtless, smug and (...)
A government that strips people of their dignity, what else is left to say," Saba Dewan told teleSUR. A new campaign #Notinmyname is sweeping India and some major international cities, with protests set for Wednesday, against the recent streak of Muslim killings near the Indian capital.
The (...)
The irresistible urge to mix politics and religion usually comes at the expense of secularism, tolerance and vulnerable minorities. We saw this recently in Asia with extremist Islamic groups spewing anti-Chinese hate speech to defeat the incumbent governor of Jakarta, the ebbing tide of (...)
Regulations banning most livestock from being sold for slaughter at markets criticised as attack on ‘the essence of India’.
India’s Hindu nationalist government has announced the tightest restrictions yet on the country’s multibillion dollar meat industry, drawing fierce protests from some states (...)
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Francais
RSS 2.0
Twitter
Facebook