South Asia Citizens Web

Delhi University (DU) re-opened to chaos and arbitrariness for the fourth year running. Thoughtlessness, dangerous neglect, the irregular and ad-hoc, the anti-academic, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual are, it seems, being normalized by the DU Administration. University functioning, driven by diktats and fear of authority following the massive usurpation of powers by the Vice-Chancellor (VC), is being kept in a state of perpetual instability ensuring a banalisation of serious concerns regarding education, freedom, equality, collective decision- making, workplace safety and other difficulties facing students, employees and pensioners.

A year after the devastating floods in the mountain state of Uttrakhand, Uma Bharti, the Union minster for water resources in India’s Hindu nationalist driven government led by Mr Narendra Modi has publicly claimed that "underlying” cause of the disaster — defecation near the shrine by non-believers.

From: Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA)

There is nothing, nothing which can persuade us to return to our villages. They burned and looted our homes: We could barely save our lives, as we desperately ran with our children in our arms and just the clothes we were wearing. What is there for us to return to?’ Words I heard over and over again in a harrowing journey through the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, exactly a year after a storm of hate overnight tore this peaceful countryside apart.

Fascism’s many faces continue to threaten societies by dividing the people into “we” and “they” and by implanting a sense of historic wrong waiting for the mass upsurge to right them. Unlike earlier fascists, there is no stated policy to kill, deport or enslave entire races and populations that are considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with superior people. But the same desired result of a racially homogeneous society that avoids the intermixing of superior peoples and those deemed to be part of inferior races is still sought. The holy men representing religious fundamentalism appear more zealous than extreme far-right parties.