I had walked at the Nandigram rally. I walked again on this issue — twice, yesterday and today (Tuesday and Wednesday). The students approached me for their rally yesterday and today I was approached by members of JUTA, of which I am not a member. But since my own principles are involved, I did not hesitate to take a stand and join the rally. All of us have felt very deeply worried...

On March 15, 2011, when the Mamata Banerjee wave was at its zenith, thespians Saonli Mitra and Arpita Ghosh went to Bansberia in Hooghly to stage the anti-establishment play 'Poshu Khamar', based on George Orwell's Animal Farm. But they were turned back by local CPM MP Rupchand Pal, who feared that the play was meant to denigrate the then ruling Left Front. The public outrage against CPM's "social hegemony" was...

-The Telegraph   A student was stabbed and injured last night as violence flared at Osmania University over a “beef festival” organised by Dalit students to assert their right to eat their traditional food on the campus. The government, worried that the issue may snowball and re-ignite the Telangana movement at its epicentre, has swamped the campus with paramilitary and police who caned the fighting students and fired tear gas. Still, skirmishes continued...

-PTI Stoking controversy, the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal banned English and mass-circulation Bengali dailies at state-sponsored and aided libraries but in a damage-control exercise late tonight said the order was being changed to include more newspapers.  The order by the state government evoked criticism from Trinamool ally Congress, Left parties and the intelligentsia which said the decision was "undemocratic, undesirable and worse than censorship." A demand for withdrawal of the...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...