South Asia Citizens Web

Since Yogi Adityanath became the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh the standards and norms of law enforcement by the police and even the judiciary have undergone visible mutation.

After forty years of war, it can be hard to remember who all your enemies were and why. Fawzia Koofi, a former deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament who has struggled through the tides of rising and falling regimes, recalled the day when her father’s body was brought back to her village. Her father, Abdul Rahman, had also been a member of parliament, and after Afghanistan’s first Communist coup in 1978, led a delegation from his village into the mountains to meet with leaders of the budding armed resistance, the Mujahideen.

Hindu College was set up in Calcutta in 1817 as a pioneering institution to impart Western learning to its students. In 1831, its most outstanding teacher, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, then only 22 years old, was compelled to resign. A look at the circumstances that forced his resignation attempts to reconstruct Derozio’s ideas and his teaching methods. The episode offers a glimpse of the intellectual ambience of early 19th-century Calcutta.

In early August, the Indian government scrapped constitutional provisions that guaranteed autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, a state torn by conflict for three decades. The government claims the move will benefit the population. More likely, it will worsen a conflict that has claimed at least 45,000 lives since the late 1980s.

Press release by Narmada Bachao Andolan, 26 September, 2019