Irom Sharmila holds a press conference after breaking her fast in Imphal, north-eastern Indian state of Manipur. Earlier on Tuesday, a judge had granted her bail after she assured him that she planned to end her fast.
Home-based work absolves the owners and managers of global supply chains from any legal obligations of fair wages, healthy work conditions and social protection to the actual end-line workers who labour in isolated home-based units.
There is one memory that Tauseef Hussain, now in his twenties, still cherishes of his grandfather Ehsan Jafri. When he visited Jafri in Ahmedabad from the United States with his mother, Jafri’s daughter, during summer vacations, he would have to sit in Jafri’s library in the stifling summer heat.
Amidst the grief, the bewilderment, the anger and the sense of loss that lingers after the brutal killings in a gay night-club in Orlando in the United States on the night of June 12, 2016, the Parliament of the World’s Religions issued a luminous statement – a moving, reflective, startlingly self-critical open letter to leaders and people of faith the world over.
On the wall is a painting of a beaming Rohith Vemula. Below his face is a poignant engraving: 1989-Forever. Under the painting on the floor are sprawled around 20 mattresses, on which groups of students sit in clusters, work on their laptops, or stretch out listlessly.
The people of India’s villages carry collective memories of centuries of calamitous losses of sometimes millions of lives in famines. Famines have been pushed into history, unarguably one of free India’s greatest accomplishments.
I celebrate student leader Kanhaiya Kumar’s walk back to freedom, his audacious challenge to communal politics, and his passionate espousal of what is most precious in our Constitution – justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. But two of his fellow university students, Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid, remain in jail, without bail, charged with sedition or crimes against the nation.
Kanhaiya says he does not want to make a career in politics. I wish he would: I cannot think of a single national leader from any party who can match his love for his country, its oppressed people and its Constitution. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)
On Saturday, I joined several thousand students, teachers and political leaders outside the office of the Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal University in Delhi, to protest the arrest of the JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, and the presence of the police on the campus.