History is a thin excuse for unrelenting majoritarianism in India and its neighbourhood Recently, a senior advocate in Karachi was charged with blasphemy after another fellow lawyer complained about his having affixed ‘Syed’ to his name in an affidavit. This, supposedly, hurt the lawyer’s religious sentiments. The case is just one instance of the tremendous … Continue reading Aggressors Claim Hurt Sentiments While Victims Face Trial →
Prof Zoya Hasan, Professor Emerita, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Distinguished Faculty, Council for Social Development, New Delhi, will be delivering the 16 th lecture in the Democracy Dialogues Series, organised by New Socialist Initiative, at 6 PM, (IST) Sunday, 27 th March, 2022. She will be speaking on ‘Challenges to India’s Democracy‘ Prof Zoya Hasan … Continue reading Challenges to India’s Democracy : Prof Zoya Hasan →
Guest Post by Gargi Chakravartty BOOK REVIEW Hindutva’s Second Coming by Subhash Gatade; published by Media House, Delhi; 2019; pages: 272; Rs 395 (US $ 18). The return of Modi to power with a huge margin in this 2019 election is a clear verdict for the Hindutva plank. Why and how it happened leave us, the secular billions, to … Continue reading Return of Hindutva: A Challenge for Secularism →
This election verdict will have vital ramifications for democracy’s onward journey for decades together, and silencing and further invisibilisation of religious minorities would be its logical outcome. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” … Continue reading Modi 2.0: Majoritarianism Normalised? →
Extract from the Preface of ‘Hindutva’s Second Coming’ Preface Democracy as Majoritarianism “We can never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, but I am sure that if I lived in … Continue reading Democracy as Majoritarianism →
Washington and New Dehli are having a mutual lovefest these days. Donald Trump is popular in India — where only 17 percent of the population considers the president “intolerant,” compared to a global average of 65 percent — and he has warmly welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House.
( Photo courtesy : The hoot) (To be published in the special issue of ‘Janata’) The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always … Continue reading Nehru, Ambedkar and Challenge of Majoritarianism
..Everybody would agree that it is a challenging task to encapsulate a great wo/man’s vision in a few words- who as a public figure has impacted not only her/his generation but future generations, initiated or channelised debates in the society, led struggles, mobilised people, wrote thousands of pages and left a legacy for all of … Continue reading For A New Rendezvous With Dr Ambedkar – Focus on Last Decade of his Life
