-The Telegraph Distressed farmers marching for 10 days ran into water cannons and tear gas on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border Distressed farmers marching for 10 days ran into water cannons and teargas on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border on Tuesday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the birth anniversary celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi who taught the world the power of non-Violence and Lal Bahadur Shastri who immortalised the “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” slogan. The...
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'When a brother goes down a sewer to clean it, we look the other way' -Sudha G Tilak
-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...
More »Centre vows to broadcast stern warning on lynching -Krishnadas Rajagopal
-The Hindu Message that mob action will invite ‘wrath of law’ to start on TV, radio in a week: Govt. tells SC The Centre on Monday assured the Supreme Court that the Union and State governments would, within a week, start broadcasting on radio and TV a stern message that mob lynchings and Violence would invite the “wrath of law”. The Centre’s promise came in response to a query by a Bench...
More »Dismantling the public university -Manoj Kumar Jha & Ghazala Jamil
-The Hindu The debate on privatising higher education must be founded on the role of such institutions in developing a democratic and inclusive society. Motihari University, Manipur University, Hyderabad Central University, Jawaharlal Nehru University — these names have become shorthand for a set of problems that get framed differently depending on who does the analysis. The list of campuses of public-funded higher education institutions where anger is simmering or has flared up...
More »The social value of religious and political dissent -Rajeev Bhargava
-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,...
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