South Asia Citizens Web

Shaukat’s memoir provides a luminous account of her new life in a Bombay bursting with new ideas in the company of gregarious comrades: Sajjad Zaheer and his wife Razia, the affable duo of Munish Saxena and S M Mehdi, Sardar Jafri and his wife Sultana who took Shaukat under her wing, the parsimonious Party Treasurer Comrade S V Ghate ...

28th Nov, 2019: In yet another of its egregious legislative misadventures, the BJP Government with support from some other parties, passed the regressive ’Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights)’ Bill, in the Rajya Sabha yesterday, despite wide-spread opposition by members of the transgender, intersex and gender non-confirming communities, seeking referral of the Bill to a Select Committee.

The November 9 judgment of Supreme Court gives the entire 2.77 acres of the Babri Mosque land to the deity Ramlalla Virajman, It also directs the central government to form a trust to oversee the construction of a temple at the site of the erstwhile mosque. These decisions of the highest court have pushed the country towards a religion based majoritarian polity, where matters of faith would stand above the rule of law, and faith of the majority community will be treated supreme.

Puri | 24th November 2019: The National Alliance of People’s Movements is holding its 12th national convention as it completes 25 years. Over 1,000 representatives from various people’s movements, organisations, and in individual capacity are participating in the three-day convention. The second day of the convention started with a human chain in a show of strength of people’s movements and groups at Puris’ famous sea beach . . .

Shortly after Narendra Modi’s rise to power, in August 2014, the RSS formed a committee, the Bharatiya Shiksha Niti Aayog, to “Indianise” the education system. It was headed by Dinanath Batra, who had specialised in rewriting Indian history according to the canons of Hindu nationalism. In 2010, he had filed a civil suit to ban Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus, which he felt gave Hinduism a bad image. Batra also pressured the University of Delhi to remove from its syllabus an essay by A K Ramanujan — Three Hundred Ramayanas — that contradicted the Hindu nationalist idea that there was a single version of the epic.