South Asia Citizens Web

THERE are not too many media houses left in India that will stand up to Prime Minister Modi’s insidious dismantling of freedoms. Universities are being destroyed by pseudo nationalist bigots, the judiciary is being subverted — how else would a high court judge feel emboldened to pontificate that peacocks are India’s national birds because they live a celibate life and have asexual reproduction? Parliament is being undermined and ordinary people are getting pitted against each other in the name of religion and caste, where Dalits are being torn away from each other to be co-opted as Hindutva’s useful fodder against their own.

By attacking the media, the present government is undermining freedom of the press, so essential for a democratic polity.

[In India] Public spaces are increasingly usurped by unscrupulous entrepreneurs to build shrines. And we know from experience that once gods and religious figures get installed in a place, they cannot be dislodged

Despite having a secular Constitution originally, successive governments after 1975 chipped away the secular edifice, to make the country more Islamic

A lesson which Kashmir policy-makers must learn from Punjab is that negotiation with the agitating outfits—unexceptionable in principle and quite necessary to settle grievances, genuine or perceived—do great harm if they are undertaken at a wrong time, i.e. when the signal given would be that the government is yielding and may agree to their separatist objective in one form or another.