-Hindustan Times Ashish Khetan uncovered the shadowy world of messy local politics, of bigots and slumlords, in Gujarat and beyond. The stories which were assembled through daring undercover operations, show that it takes decades of hard work to infuse hostility and create an ecosystem of fear From journalism to judiciary and from police to Parliament, do you see a trend of partisanship getting rewarded and excellence punished? In Under Cover; My Journey...
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‘The Population Myth’ review: Not a ‘demographic’ battle -A Faizur Rahman
-The Hindu With logic, and data from unimpeachable sources, former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi’s book debunks the myth around exaggerated fears of Indian Muslim numbers An impartial analysis of Islamophobia in India would reveal that what generated it was not Islam but a sense of political insecurity born out of exaggerated fears of Muslim numbers. These anxieties came to the fore in the early 1900s after the partition of Bengal, the...
More »Amid polls, festivals, migrants continue to leave Bihar -Avishek G Dastidar
-The Indian Express Railways has introduced clone trains to replicate services with a long waiting list. Out of the 40 such trains, around 24 are from stations in Bihar. Even as the Opposition in Bihar tries to make the plight of migrant workers an election issue, train passenger data shows high occupancy rates on routes connecting the state with destinations that rely heavily on migrant labour. The demand has been such that...
More »Kesavananda Bharati — the petitioner who saved democracy, but lost his case in Supreme Court -Krishnadas Rajagopal
-The Hindu The historic Fundamental Rights case prevented the nation from slipping into a totalitarian regime Kesavananda Bharati Swamiji, the sole unwitting petitioner in the historic Fundamental Rights case which prevented the nation from slipping into a totalitarian regime, died on Sunday. He was 80. Though the judgment is a landmark, the Swamiji did not win any relief in the case. The amendments in the Kerala land reforms law which he had challenged...
More »There’s no one to fill Mahalanobis’s shoes -Atanu Biswas
-The Hindu India needs a top statistician to frame data-based policies for welfare and development In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen argued that poor distribution of food, wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding were important reasons for the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, while Madhusree Mukerjee, in her 2010 book, Churchill’s Secret War, wrote of the role of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wartime Cabinet’s decisions and “denial policy”...
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