South Asia Citizens Web

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 . . .

Today, higher education in India is faced with its gravest threat. Already in a state of crisis as a result of years of overload in conditions of financial and academic neglect, it is now being subjected to authoritarian functioning, loss of autonomy, sudden and frequent imposition of academic schemes and structural changes without due consideration and adequate debate among students and teachers, lack of facilities and an acute shortage of permanent faculty. The withdrawal of the state from its obligation to sustain this significant social sector has facilitated the trend to privatize and commercialize universities, colleges, and technical and professional courses has gathered momentum over the last two decades . . .