It was raining outside the Jai Prakash Narain Central Jail in Ranchi on Friday. Seven members of a lynch mob walked out of the gates; one had been released a day earlier.
Most targets of such attacks are Muslims. IndiaSpend, in a rapid survey of reported cow-related attacks since 2010, found that over half of those attacked and 86 per cent of those killed were Muslims.
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.
Although catastrophic communal massacres recur from time to time, the Indian State has never appointed truth and reconciliation commissions.
This blistering summer of 2016, two years have passed since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triumphantly assumed office, heading the first Bharatiya Janata Party-led national government with a comfortable majority in Parliament.
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)
Former IAS officer Harsh Mander has appealed to the Union government and the Delhi Police to drop the charges of sedition against Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested last week based on a video showing other students raising anti-national slogans at an event on the campus.
An audacious sense of hope is surging through the soft spring sunshine in Delhi, following the unprecedented victory of AAP in the recent polls. That people of every class, caste, religious community, age-group and gender joined hands to place their futures in the hands of a fledgling and still mostly untested political formation, represents a resounding endorsement of a new style of politics, as much as a longing for a new kind of governance.
With the 1983 Nellie massacre, India entered a new chapter of mass communal violence: of large-scale slaughters of religious minorities with gravely culpable state support.
In yet another display of vendetta against prominent critics of the prime minister, Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt was served with orders of dismissal from service on August 13, 2015. This is the highest administrative punishment that an officer can face, provided in the rule book for only the most serious transgressions.