South Asia Citizens Web

[This initiative is the result of a collective endeavor launched in May 2020 by three scholars: Isabelle Ferreras, Dominique Méda, and Julie Battilana. The three share an abiding interest in democratic and sustainable ways of working and organizing that diverge from the model of shareholder value maximization. The initiative came from a hope to help in the unfolding crisis – in health, climate, the economy, and political life – that we are facing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. (…)

PUCL is deeply concerned at the swiftness with which many states in the nation are dismantling the protection afforded to workers under their various labour laws. These laws provide many of the basic guarantees to workers – ensuring that employees get paid decent wages on time, have reasonable working hours, and are not subject to discrimination. They require employers to provide basic necessities such as drinking water and clean toilets to workers and protect them from accidents and occupational hazards and diseases. Labour laws are essential for ensuring fundamental rights for our workers - rights which are guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to all Indian citizens, at all times. PUCL believes that withdrawing these protections from the working population in an effort to entice new businesses, is an unconstitutional, immoral and unethical attempt to revive an economy at the expense of its weakest citizens.

Excerpt from an interview with Roger Griffin, Professor of Contemporary History at the Faculty of Humanities at Oxford Brookes University in England. Griffin is one of the world’s most renowned contemporary fascism researchers. We talked to him in Berlin in May 2019 about new fascist developments

from 1975. With an introduction by Phil O’Brien of the Raymond Williams Society.

How does one make sense of a still-nascent democracy that has been rapidly hijacked by majoritarian chauvinists, forcing its minorities into siege-like conditions; a situation where social, economic, and political predicaments continue to feed upon and strengthen each other in a noxious symbiosis, while those who struggle are at a loss on how to find their way out of this imbroglio? It is a crucial challenge of our times to understand how the RSS can be prevented from using problems within the Muslim community to vilify them and use these as means to push its toxic Hindutva agenda, while at the same time, encouraging the urgent need for societal reforms which is thwarted by external threats that minorities in India undeniably face today.