South Asia Citizens Web

There are some laws that are observed more in the breach. The law on Delhi’s permissible drinking age must be one of them. India recognises its citizens as responsible adults when they attain 18 years of age. You can vote, get a driving licence or join the military at 18; the legal age for marriage is 18 for girls and 21for boys. Yet it’s illegal for you to have a drink in a public place before you turn 25.

Editorial from DNA, The Times of India and The Indian Express over The murder of a 50-year-old man at Dadri, just 45 kms from Delhi, over rumours that his family consumed beef.

When I read of the killing, in Bisara village of Dadri, of a Muslim man by Hindus who suspected him of keeping beef in his house, I was taken back to the Gujarat massacre of 2002. That wound is fresh: the passing of a dozen years has done nothing to lessen the pain and the anger. Indeed, many more wounds have been added after Modi’s election victory, which has enabled the underlying evil to spread its tentacles and grow more vicious. It is not surprising that people are reacting to Dadri with fear and loathing.

The entre civilized world felt outraged when a young Christian couple, daily wage labourers on a brick kiln at Kot Radha Kishan, 40 miles from Lahore were brutally murdered on November 4, 2014 on the mischievous and vicious unsubstantiated allegation plea of committing blasphemy. Ten months later a poor Muslim farm labourer at Dadri was bludgeoned to death and his young son, trying to save a middle aged father, equally brutally beaten up, two days after Baqrid festival, involving slaughter of goats. Dadri is closer to India’s national Capital than Kot Radha Kishan was from the Pakistani Punjab capital. In both cases no one felt the need to ascertain the truth behind the allegation.

For some time now, the votaries of the Hindu Right have maligned the approach of what they describe as Liberal-Left scholars, interchangeably described as anti-Indian, anti-national and anti-Hindu. Such historians are faulted for their focus on social and economic structures, for critical and evaluative rather than “pride-inducing” engagements with the past . . .