-TheWire.in After three days, the families were brought some ration by the authorities. However, no case has been filed against those who beat and abused them. Hoshiarpur: Several children, women and men on Wednesday continued to hide themselves in the Swan riverbed, without for the food for three days now, on the Punjab side of the state’s marshy borders with Himachal Pradesh. They were allegedly abused, beaten and chased away from their...

-TheWire.in Racist and communal poison, backed by a section of the media and intelligentsia, has long been a staple of politics. In these days of COVID-19, I am spending a lot of time catching up on history and it is clear that there are deep connections between the evils of our present times and what happened in days gone by. Whenever there is a clash between truth and belief, there is politics...

-The Tribune The recent violence that consumed Delhi forces us to confront a horrific if familiar truth: media-constructed ‘enemies’ eventually turn into flesh-and-blood people. The pogrom against the Sikhs in 1984, as the work of academics like the Oxford-based Pritam Singh reminds us, was preceded by what Singh termed “deeply embedded institutional Communalism” in the coverage of events like Operation Bluestar and Indira Gandhi’s funeral by government-run media All India Radio and...

-TheWire.in A new study from LSE, funded by a grant from WhatsApp, shines a spotlight on Hindu males and disinformation against minority groups. New Delhi: New research suggests that the spread of fake news in India that sparks mob lynchings is largely done out of “reasons of prejudice and ideology”, rather than “ignorance or digital literacy”. “It can be seen…that assuming most misinformation spreads through rural and/or illiterate users and targeting functional digital...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...