South Asia Citizens Web

PUCL Maharashtra expresses shock and dismay at reports that the BMC and BEST administration have chosen to invoke draconian provisions of the Maharashtra Essential Services Maintenance Act (MESMA) against striking BEST employees, instead of taking steps to respond to their demands and alleviate their grievances at the earliest.

In India, they tell us that women can be anything we wish. We can be fighter-jet pilots, corporate CEOs, paratroopers, athletes — and, of course, prime minister. (We never get tired of reminding Americans of this, since the United States is still waiting for its first female head of state.) But God forbid we dare to argue that, in 2019, menstruation should not bar us from praying at a temple. What sort of global power can the world’s largest democracy aspire to be when our monthly period is still used to make women feel like polluted pariahs who must be kept at a distance? Is this not repugnant modern-day untouchability?

CHS seminar discussion on 27 November 2018 held at School of Social Sciences 1 at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi

Everything was happening very fast: in Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, China — which was coming to the end of the Cultural Revolution, though we didn’t know it at the time. Meanwhile Europeans looked on in astonishment as their own young people said things that had never been heard before and that had an irresistible impact. In early May, the student protests at the University of Nanterre reached boiling point and overflowed to Paris where they became a symbol for the whole world. Then the movement spread beyond the universities. In a few days, France was brought to a standstill by a general strike and power vacillated. Power meant no less than Charles de Gaulle. He, too, took his time to respond; first he disappeared for a few days, leaving a dangerous vacuum — where had he gone and who with? General Massu, the torturer of Algeria? — and then reappeared, alone and his usual arrogant self, to put an end to the disorder. He had understood, or had bet, that the youthful wave of protest would back off from getting involved in the political sphere and any attempt to replace his government with one led by Pierre Mendès-France, who had marched with the students up to the symbolic Place Denfert Rochereau.

What is precarity? And how does it adapt to the Eastern European context? In the 11th episode of Contrasens’ podcast, we take a closer look at work and workers. Together with our guest, Volodya Artyukh, who is a Ph.D researcher at C.E.U., we talk about labor aspects in the Eastern European space, specifically in Belarus. Our focus is on workers’ solidarity and protests in the context of ideological change in an ex-soviet country