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The national daily Hindustan Times carried an article (‘Comparing Hitler’s Germany with India 2014 is odious’, Marcus Pindur and Padma Rao Sunderji, HT 23rd may 2014), the following is the response to that.
With Modi coming to power in the 2014 elections various analysts have been arguing (…)
Secular, pluralist and democratic Indians in the country and abroad are mourning the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their ‘star’ candidate, Narendra Modi, the ‘Butcher of Gujarat’, as Prime Minister of India for the next five years.
As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi grounded (…)
The most interesting — and insidious — aspect of this election is the mainstreaming of the sangh parivar’s principal belief : that India is a Hindu nation.
The ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have consistently maintained that India as a nation ought to be defined by the culture (…)
Venomous communal election rhetoric, adding fuel to long-simmering ethnic and communal fires, has taken a terrible toll in Assam. Over 30 people, most of them Muslim women and children, were massacred in Assam’s Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD).
The BTAD region has witnessed a (…)
AN APPEAL TO INDIAN VOTERS
Dear Fellow-Indians,
The best thing about our country is its cultural diversity, its pluralism - the co-existence of a number of religions and ethnicities over centuries, and hence the blooming of multiple streams of intellectual and artistic thought. And, this has (…)
Edited version of my speech at the Calcutta Press Club during the National Seminar on Communal Fascism seminar on 12th April. In view of Hindu’s garbled report, all the more necessary. This incorporates things I said in response to questions, but omits certain responses to Nazrul, who went into (…)
The country is yet to recover from the aftermath of Muzaffranagar violence (October 2013). This violence was engineered over a period of time in the areas of Western UP, where Jats and Muslims had thick social interaction, despite belonging to different economic strata. Communal violence has (…)
COMMUNALISM, a twisted offshoot of religion, breeds in a fertile manmade atmosphere of strife. But it also thrives in natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods and cyclones.
The current rain-induced havoc in Uttarakhand, host to several Hindu pilgrimages in India’s Himalayan foothills, (…)
his article is a chapter of the book ‘Five Years of Saffron Rule in Karnataka’ Edited by Ambrose Pinto S.J., Manak Publications, Delhi, P. 338, 2013.
“Here it is enough to point out that Hindutva is not identical with what is vaguely indicated by the term Hinduism.By an”ism“it is generally (…)
Education as a battlefield
It has been obvious for a long time that the Sangh Parivar takes history teaching very seriously. From rewriting school textbooks in BJP-ruled states, to running millions of schools, to campaigning for the elimination of Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from the (…)
HYDERABAD: The city police have launched a manhunt for four persons belonging to the Hindu community who they suspect triggered the communal disturbances in Old City last Sunday by hurling a piece of beef on the walls of the Hanuman Temple at Kurmaguda in Madannapet. All the four are residents (…)
Ten years on, we need to consider the links between the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 and economic globalization.
In February 2002 the western Indian state of Gujarat, governed by the Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi, witnessed one of the country’s biggest pogroms. Responding to (…)
Independent India’s leaders declared that the country belonged equally to all its citizens; Jinnah said the same thing for Pakistan on the eve of its independence. Unlike Pakistan, which declared itself an Islamic republic, India did not change its stated objective of secularism but neither did (…)
India’s Human Development Report 2011 cites only a minuscule improvement in the socio-economic status of Muslims in India compared with other excluded groups. Ayesha Pervez explores the government’s response to this situation and explains why the extreme deprivation and exclusion of Muslims (…)
Ramayana controversy: India’s pluralism under threat again
As Delhi University’s pusillanimous decision to scrap A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on 300 versions of the epic Ramayana shows, vice chancellors and professors easily choose the discretion of trashing a book or a work of art over the valour (…)
“There are two tyrannies of a religious majority. The first is easy to recognize and challenge : it occurs against some religious minority external to the majority. The second usually goes unnoticed : it occurs against some small minority within the majority. Justice, nevertheless, requires that (…)
In Bihar, three incidents of killing of Muslim minorities by police or security forces have taken place in a space of months.
Remember these?
1984 Delhi: On October 31, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards at her official residence, in revenge for Operation Blue Star. For the next three days, as Doordarshan telecast the lying in state of her body, over 3,000 Sikhs men and boys were (…)
On 6 December 1992, Sangh Parivar mobs demolished the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. They were led by the top leaders of the BJP – including Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti. Each blow struck at the historic structure of the mosque was a deliberate, grievous blow to the secular (…)
Starting as Maratha chauvinist outfit, Shiv Sena has emerged as a fascist political force threatening the very existence of a secular India.
The Shiv of this Sena is the 17th century Mahratta leader Shivaji; the Sena was organized by a newspaper cartoonist, Bal Thakre, who initially attempted (…)
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