South Asia Citizens Web

We, the undersigned are lawyers practising in different places across the country, who also believe in creating a robust criminal justice system, which is responsive to the needs of survivors of violent sexual crimes. We have received news of a very disturbing incident in distant Araria, and involving a 22-year-old, who was violently gang-raped on July 6th, and her two caregivers/friends. While recording her S.164 statement on July 10th, the learned magistrate perceived her disoriented state of mind as a personal affront and remanded her (and her two caregivers) into custody for contempt of court. The three have been remanded into judicial custody in Dalsinghsarai Jail, about 240Kms from Araria. The survivor’s details, including her father’s name and full address, have also been disclosed in the local press. The news reports cite the Court staff as having provided the details.

Current times aren’t exactly favourable to revolutionary politics, whatever banner it may be. Revolution is a term of reproach, a supposedly ‘discredited’ idea that always leads to more disastrous results than before. Among stolid liberal wiseacres, it is convention to excommunicate Thomas Paine and embrace the grandiloquent Edmund Burke. After all, drastic, large scale social and political change inevitably fail, with misery, bloodshed and needless chaos being its only result.

ON APRIL 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, scattering highly radioactive materials into the surroundings. As the fire ignited by the explosion in the reactor core burned, more radioactive effluent was expelled and swept by the winds from the Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, to much of Europe.

12th July, 2020: National Alliance of People’s Movements expresses deep concern over the series of destructive and extractive projects being taken up in the bio-diverse rich regions of the North-Eastern states that jeopardize the interests of wild life and humans alike. ‘Dehing Patkai’ in Upper Assam became a flash point of resistance last month after the recent “recommendation for approval” by the National Board of Wild Life (NBWL), to allow open cast mining by Coal India Limited in about 98.59 hectares of land in the Saleki Reserve Forest (Digboi), which is a part of the Dehing Patkai Elephant Reserve.

We, the signatories, are all Veterans of the Indian Armed Forces, who have served in the defence of our nation in various ranks and appointments in peacetime and in operational/war zones, over the past several decades.