Where Are India’s Dissenting Hindus?
In these troubled times, the world’s two largest democracies – India and the US – are increasingly becoming hostile, threatening places for people with Muslim names.
Mourning Rohith Vemula, Who Could Not Rescue Himself From the ‘Fatal Accident’ of His Birth
In the summer of 2016, many students sat on a hunger strike in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. They were protesting the punishment meted out to them by the university authorities for having demonstrated against the hanging of Afzal Guru.
Why are Indian students angry
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.
Angry Dalits in Gujarat won’t take it lying down
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.
Saluting Bezwada Wilson, a man who gets his hands dirty to clean the rot of caste oppression
There’s a shameful practice with a tragic legacy that has gone on in India for millennia. It involves entrapping women, men and even children into a hated and humiliating occupation only because of the accident of their birth into the lowest caste.
Love, justice and stardust: A requiem for Rohith Vemula
Like millions across the land, I mourn inconsolably the passing of a young man who dreamed of the stars, yet despaired of our world enough to take his young life. After writing a few words of fire, of yearning and pain, in the hostel room of a friend, he quietly hanged himself to death.
The conversion crusade: Competing for people’s souls
Free India was born in a tumult of religious hatred. This, and the fact that this country is home to followers of almost every major religion, persuaded members of the Constituent Assembly to exercise great care to protect the freedom of religious belief in the Constitution.
Many degrees of hopelessness in India’s villages
The picture of rural Indian life today that emerges from what is probably the world’s largest study ever of household deprivation is sobering and sombre.
India has become a more unequal society than any other time in its recent history
Two most formidable challenges that will engage the peoples and governments of all countries on the planet during the 21st century will be the ways in which they handle inequality and deal with diversity. Historically, India has culturally sanctioned inequalities of gender, caste and class more than any other ancient civilisation.
A law to end targeted violence
Among free India’s gravest failures—along with its inability to end hunger, pervasive poverty and discrimination—is the continued targeting of people with violence and arson only because of their faith or caste.