South Asia Citizens Web

Dear Justice (Markandey) Katju, as a former judge of the highest court in the country and as a defender of free expression in your current capacity as chairperson, Press Council of India, you are understandably outraged by the criminal conduct of the Maharashtra police in arresting two women from Palghar in Thane district last week for having “dared” to express their disapproval on Facebook of the bandh enforced by sainiks following Bal Thackeray’s “unacceptable” demise. You have shot off a strong letter to Maharashtra’s chief minister

School textbooks continue to portray a predominantly male and patriarchal world. Women are depicted as demure, stay-at-home accessories for the male. They seem to exist only to preserve the status quo

We, the undersigned, are gravely concerned that the teachers of Delhi University have felt compelled to sit on an indefinite relay hunger strike since 10 October 2012. The teachers have been on hunger strike for well over a month now. We find it shocking and incomprehensible that the Delhi University Vice-Chancellor has refused to even meet with them. Neither has he met with the students and non-teaching staff who have joined their protests.

One wonders once again about the differences, if any, between a multi-party democracy like India, and a one-party totalitarian Communist state like China. In both countries the social media is under attack, bloggers are hauled over hot coals, punished with imprisonment and legal cases. In India the political class has taken to a wink-wink, nudge-nudge game. Let the police make the arrests, its a good way of teaching the ’culprits’ not to be irreverent towards the high and mighty. The IT law with its sinister section 66A is used time and again to ’straighten’ the ’rebellious’ online community. It’s time to scrap that offending section.

The Thane rural police have behaved arbitrarily and against the law for which the policemen involved must be prosecuted. Shiv Sena goons also vandalized a clinic being run by an uncle of one of the girls. It is condemnable that under the Congress-NCP Government it was not the vandals who destroyed medical equipment and threatened the patients at Palghar who were promptly acted against but two young girls who have every right to express their opinion.