This 26 year-old university student cries easily. We meet Sumit in a story front-paged in The Indian Express: “He cried that day in 2015 when he travelled from his hometown Hisar to Delhi and found his name on the admission list of JNU’s MA programme
India’s public universities and technical institutes are suddenly transforming into sites of youthful turmoil and bitter contestations. Unfolding within their walls are battles for freedom of speech in universities, and less edifying skirmishes about nationalism.
Gently and with the quiet dignity that characterised the way he lived his entire life, Anupam Mishra left the world on December 19, 2016. He was 68, felled after a long and painful battle against cancer.
On May 11, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launched on the floor of Parliament a bitter and frontal attack on India’s judiciary. In words now famous, he claimed: “Step by step, brick by brick, the edifice of India’s legislature is being destroyed.”
Faced with the unrelenting juggernaut of manufactured hyper-nationalism and majoritarian fundamentalism from the powerful political right, the response of India’s largest national opposition political party, the Indian National Congress, has for long been unsteady, confused and lacking in the courage of its convictions.
My mother was forced to leave behind the city of her birth, Rawalpindi, when she was just 18 because of the tumultuous ruptures of Partition. She had never returned. When she was to turn 75, I thought the best gift I could give her was to take her, if it was at all possible, to the city and to the home in which she was born.
Menacing clouds have gathered earlier as well over the picturesque lake city of Bhopal. Clouds of dangerous, even criminal, public malfeasance. In the winter of 1984, the people of the city endured the world’s worst industrial disaster in history.
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older. The cruel traditions of the past 2,000 years have trapped them into stigmatised occupations, regarded ritually “unclean”.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-RSS combine is using its usual communal card. The Samajwadi Party is complicit. Rahul Gandhi has tried to raise some relevant issues, but it’s not backed by credible evidence of sustained ground-level engagement. That leaves the BSP-led Mayawati. If indeed the Dalit and Muslim voters across UP heed Mayawati’s call, it…
These are times of global disquiet. Gales of hatred and bigotry are sweeping country after country around the world. After Donald Trump’s emphatic and stunning electoral success to the office of the president of the US, I wrote this mail to many American friends: