It would be hard to find a building more burdened with suffering and memory in all of Delhi. And yet, if you walked past it, you would hardly turn your head to look at it again. There was nothing that distinguished it from the tens of thousands of other urban cages anywhere in the country.
It is highly unfortunate that the NHRC report plays into the communal stereotype that dates back to Partition — of Muslim young men sexually harassing Hindu girls.
All of 19 years old, Raheem’s voice was steady as he spoke about the uprooting, betrayal and loss his family endured during the communal violence which swept the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh in 2013.
A middle-aged man who repairs shoes on a street corner in Ahmedabad and who has slept for many years on the pavements of the city is one among the hundreds who joined the Azadi Kooch, the protest march from Ahmedabad to Una village in Gir Somnath district against the public lashing of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There can be no better encapsulation of the idea of the good state, one which must be founded on the idea of social solidarity, on the continuous mindfulness of its obligation to care for every person, weak and strong. Chomsky goes on to say that we live in times when this is considered a profoundly subversive idea.