In a Tumultuous 2019, These Four Hindi Films Brought Out Our Shared Humanity
Harsh Mander’s selection of movies that looked at India with empathy and hope.
CAA protests mark collective rejection of toxic politics and policies that dominate public life
India’s young have picked up mantle of an older battle — for a country that is equal, just and kind
In Aligarh, police used stun grenades against students – and university officials justified this
Stun grenades are used only in war situations and for militarised policing, never to quell student protests. The police lead a protestor away at Aligarh Muslim University on December 15. | PTI A young doctoral scholar lay calmly on his hospital bed in Aligarh. I could not have mustered his courage and equanimity. Just two…
India’s skies have dimmed, says Harsh Mander
Activist Harsh Mander writes about how the Constitution had been under constant assault over many decades but it still endured. Now, with the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Constitution has been felled
CAB and NRC: Why I Will Register Myself as a Muslim
“Doing so will clear the moral pathways of the civil disobedience I intend to carry out against the graded hierarchy of citizenship.”
If Parliament passes the Citizenship Amendment Bill, India’s constitutional structure, as we know it, will lose its soul
The CAB-NRC poses the gravest threat to India’s secular democratic constitution since India became a republic, and must be fought with a nation-wide civil disobedience movement. The contours of this struggle need to be worked out by We the People.
On NRC, Shah and Gogoi show a similar disregard for suffering of the vulnerable.
Justice Gogoi chose a moment, a few days before he remitted office, in a public function in Delhi, to vigorously defend the NRC in Assam. It is unusual for an incumbent Chief Justice to publicly declare his views on highly politically fraught matters.
The frequent deaths of India’s sewer workers isn’t a governance failure – they are rooted in caste
The philosophy of caste validates the casual subjection of sanitation workers to the hazardous, humiliating task of cleaning sewers and septic tanks.
The Ayodhya Judgment in India’s Enveloping Darkness
Finding land to build a mosque or temple was never the question. It was whether those who razed the mosque should be punished, or rewarded for their illegal act by being allowed to erect a temple at the site of their crime.
One morning, returning from visiting his sister, an 80-year-old Muslim man was lynched in Sitamarhi
Rumours had swirled about a Durga idol being damaged by a stone hurled from a mosque. Zainul Ansari paid the price. Zainul Ansari and his grandson at Delhi’s Red Fort. There is no other part of the world that Zainul Ansari had known and loved in the eight decades of his life. This noisy, crowded,…