South Asia Citizens Web

There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research.

Megha Pansare speaking in hindi about the long delay in investigation of killings of rationalists, Dhabolkar, Pansare and Kalburgi at the sit-in organised by Maharashtra Andhshraddha Nirmulan Samiti at Jantar Mantar [New Delhi] on February 12th, 2016

I scrolled through a series of videos and images. The first one was titled “Confession,” and featured a newspaper editor being harangued by a talk-show host. Further down, I saw a photograph of a crowd burning an effigy of this man. There was another, a Photoshopped image of the man with devil’s horns affixed to his head. Then there were the news stories, the tally of lawsuits against him rising to 30, 40, 70 cases. Finally, there was a statement from the prime minister of Bangladesh: The editor should resign and face trial. The editor is my father, Mahfuz Anam, and the newspaper is The Daily Star, the English-language paper he co-founded 25 years ago.

In accepted usage a “national” is a person who belongs to a nation, a citizen; but “anti-national” has nothing to do with this. [...] The Hindu Right and its flunkeys in the media have been using the expression. Any person who goes against the Hindu Right in any way is labelled “anti-national”. In its meaninglessness the expression is like “pseudo secular”, which until today has not been defined by those who fling it about with such abandon. It is no more than a term of abuse which has nothing to do with reality.

Lecture by Professor Romila Thapar the celebrated historian and former teacher at the Jawaharlal Nehru University speaking of Indian history and the conceptions of nationalism on 6 March 2016 held at the open air protest teach-in at the admin block at JNU campus in New Delhi