Six months have passed since the Supreme Court — anguished by what it described as ‘horrific acts of mobocracy’ — issued a slew of directions to the Union and State governments to protect India’s ‘pluralist social fabric’ from mob violence.
‘The role of the Samajwadi Party (SP) government and of other parties that claim to be “secular” require much closer investigations.’
The long shadow of death fell sombrely on the banks of the Brahmaputra, in Assam, in November. Five men, all Bengali Hindu settlers whose families fled the East Pakistan district of Sylhet in 1964, were picked up from their village by men dressed in battle fatigues on November 1, and shot dead.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and one of the most credible voices in public life in India, worries about a second partition…
Hindutva terror banks on majoritarian prejudice in the criminal justice system as much as the larger public opinion, which assumes that Muslims are guilty even of terror attacks that clearly target their own community.
India has been the site of recurring episodes of horrific hate violence, which target people disadvantaged by caste, religious identity and gender. In all such episodes — of Dalit atrocities, communal killings, lynching, gang-rapes — we tend to imagine the perpetrators of these crimes…
When the sun went down on 2018, the doors closed for one million residents of Assam who were unable to file their claims to prove that they are Indian citizens.