-The Hindu Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today? Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong,...

-TheWire.in New Delhi: Criticising the country or a particular aspect of it cannot be treated as “sedition” and the charge  of sedition can only be invoked in cases where the intention is to overthrow the government with violence and illegal means, the Law Commission has observed in a consultation paper on the subject. The commission, headed by Justice (retired) B.S. Chauhan, also noted that in order to study the revision of Section...

-The New Indian Express Over 40 lakh people were left out of Assam’s draft citizenship list. India is a land of immigrants. Inclusion, not exclusion, has been our motto The second draft of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been published with 40 lakh people not finding their names in it. They are on the verge of becoming stateless. There are apprehensions of ethnic cleansing or disenfranchisement now due to the...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-TheWire.in The Centre's decision to defer the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill 2018 – after protests from the public and the opposition – is temporary good news. Sub-section (5) of Section 13 of the Right to Information Act provided that the salaries and allowance and other terms and conditions of service of the chief information commissioner and information commissioners shall be same as that of the chief election commissioner and election commissioners,...