A People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Karnataka, report “Criminalizing the Practice of Faith”, seeking to trace “hate crimes” on Christians in Karnataka between January and November this year, allegedly by Hindutva groups, has said that the “bogey” of conversion is being used by the current BJP rulers in the State in order to “target the Constitutional right to practice, profess and propagate religion, as recognized under Article 25.”

  An Odisha NGO report “Bridging the Gap: Reimagining School Education in a Post-Covid Scenario” has said that nearly two-thirds of children (63.3 %) could not get required support from their family members to deal with their emotional, social and learning support during the pandemic, when the schools were closed. This happened even as 91.09% of the children reported they did not have access to smartphone, making their learning “difficult and stressful.”

The real freedom fighting brigade Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut may have her own reasons to say that India acquired real freedom in May 2014, when Narendra Modi came to occupy India’s seat of power.  There was little to be amused by what she said, for, as many commentators have variously pointed out, her viewpoint was surely based on her little or no knowledge of the history of the Indian freedom movement. I wasn’t surprised, as most of the Bollywood “stars” are devoid of any sense of history; they appear to be more guided by their own circumstances when utter something. But what amused me was a Facebook post with a screenshot of a Guardian editorial dated May 18, 2014, which said virtually the same thing as Ranaut -- except that it didn’t call India achieving independence as “bheek” (alms) in 1947. I decided to search for a link – and I found it:  here  it is! The Facebook post which I have referred to expressed surprise over the Guardian editorial, stating, it’s a Left...

An anti-Taliban protest in Afghanistan Bollywood poet Jawed Akhtar has surely triggered Hornet’s nest. By suggesting that some of RSS-BJP-Sangh Parivar’s ways are similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan, he has angered all those have adorned wear the saffron safa, including the Shiv Sena. While the saffron “anger” has been reported well across the media, every effort is also being made to minutely examine every movement, every step of the Taliban. One of them indeed amused me. The Hindustan Times  reported  on last Wednesday that the Taliban had “introduced” several 'conditions' to restrict protest in Afghanistan, which, the story predicts, will “raise eyebrows around the world.” In its latest diktat, the Taliban said permission “needs to be taken from the ministry of justice before any protest is organised.” While seeking the permission, the organisers would need to reveal the “purpose, slogans, place, time and all 'other' details of the protest” so that the authorities ...

  A new report by non-profit LibTech India, which comprises of engineers, activists and social scientists as its members, has objected to what inordinate delay in wage payments in the rural jobs scheme under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to the rural workers belonging to the non-scheduled caste (SC) and non-scheduled tribe (ST) categories.

  Situated in Surendranagar district of Gujarat, Thangadh, known as the ceramic hub of India, also characterises by its industrial units refusing to pay minimum wages or providing necessary health facilities eligible under the law. In all, about 20,000 workers are employed in Thangarh and nearby towns in in about 225 ceramic units manufacturing sanitary ware and other ceramic items.

A high profile report prepared by the influential  American Bar Association  (ABA)  Center for Human Rights , taking note of the fact that “in the 70-year history of the Indian Republic, only six Dalit judges have been appointed to the Supreme Court”, has taken strong exception to what it calls “lack of representation of Dalits” in the legal profession and the judiciary.

  In a surprise admission, the Ahmedabad Municipal Commission (AMC) has said that “ill-treated or untreated or partly treated” industrial waste from “improperly working” effluent treatment plants (ETPs) is being “discharged into Sabarmati directly”. It added in an affidavit filed in the Gujarat High Court (HC) that “completely untreated industrial discharge” is also being “illegally discharged into the sewerage network” designed for household sewage.

  Former Gujarat topcop RB Sreekumar, an IPS officer of the 1971 batch, has alleged that the Gujarat government gave “totally false information” on the floor of the State Assembly regarding the  appeal  he made to the Gujarat governor for the “initiation of departmental action against those responsible for culpable negligence in maintenance of public order and investigation of genocidal crimes” during the 2002 riots.

The National Council of Women Leaders (NCWL), a civil rights group, has compiled what it has called “landmark cases of caste-based sexual violence” between 1985 and 2020 to mark the first anniversary of the notorious Hathras gangrape case, which led to the death of a young Dalit woman in September 2020.

In a scathing critique of the 2002 communal riots inquiry commission report, released by the Gujarat government in December 2019 five years after it was submitted, the State’s former topcop RB Sreekumar has said that it “unequivocally” and “meticulously” takes care “to refrain from probing and taking cognizance of any deviant action of omission and commission by the State administration, particularly those operating in the criminal justice system, who facilitated extensive mass violence and enabled brigands to perpetrate anti-minority crimes.”

  In a controversial move, which runs contrary to the current Modi government policy, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which falls under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in a new report has asked the Government of India (GoI) to ensure that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act 2015 – called anti-atrocities Act – should be applied to not just those Dalits which are supposed to part of Hindu religion.

Najib with Gorbachev The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan has taken me down the memory lane to my Soviet days, when I was special correspondent of the daily “Patriot” and the weekly “Link”, both semi-Left papers, in Moscow. I landed in the Soviet capital on January 23, 1986. Mikhail Gorbachev was already in command of the Soviet Communist Party after the 27th Congress – the first major event which I covered in Moscow. Already words like perestroika and glasnost were in the air, with ideas floating around that these would be applied to the foreign policy as well. A year passed by, and I got an invitation from the Soviet information department to visit Afghanistan. I was keen, as I had already found that Gorbachev wanted Soviet troops, stationed there since 1979, to withdraw. He seemed confident that under the new Afghan regime under Najib (who later renamed himself as Najibullah), the country would implement what was called a “national reconciliation” plan by “uniting” opposing forc...

  A recent report, “India’s Unequal Healthcare Story”, based on 768 respondents from households in seven states, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Kerala, Bihar and Odisha, has regretted that while all sections faced “a hoard of issues during hospitalization for Covid-19”, the experiences during hospitalization “varied across income groups.”

A new Covid survey report, published by well-known human rights organisation Anhad, has said that 84.7 per cent of 2,243 respondents said it was necessary for all religious places to be closed down during the second wave of Covid-19. In sharp contrast, only 49.5 per cent supported the lockdown, with 37.5 per cent saying they were “unhappy” with it, insisting, it created problems instead of presenting a solution, 36.7 percent reported loss of earning and 32.5 percent said their freedom to move was curtailed.

  A new report on a Government of India scheme meant for housing to the poor, floated in May 2020 following the massive migrants crisis that gripped the country, has said that 39% of the 93,295 units in the 52 existing projects for providing cheap rental housing, surveyed in India’s 11 cities, are vacant. Called Affordable Rental Housing Complex (ARHC) scheme, meant to provide “formal, affordable and well-located housing to urban poor and migrant workers’ communities”, it was announced as part of the Rs 20 lakh crore Atmanirbhar Bharat relief package by the Modi government.

  This is sort of rejoinder to my Counterview  story . I was a little surprised on receiving a phone call from a former government official, who retired in 2015, Bipin Bhatt, whom I have known as one of the more socially conscious senior babus of Gujarat. A non-IAS bureaucrat, I first interacted him during my Gandhinagar days, when I used to cover Gujarat Sachivalaya for the Times of India. At that time he was Gujarat’s rural labour commissioner, a post which he occupied between 2004 and 2007. Thereafter I have been in touch with him. Bhatt phoned me up objecting to the story (“Debt bondage, forced labour, sexual abuse in Gujarat's Bt cottonseed farms: Dutch study”) based on a  study  published by a Dutch NGO, Arisa, with the active help of the Ahmedabad-based labour rights group Centre for Labour Research and Action (CLRA), which has carried out considerable work among migrant workers, especially those who are from Gujarat’s eastern tribal belt. Apparently, Bha...

   A just-released study, sponsored by a Netherlands-based non-profit,  Arisa , “Seeds of Oppression Wage sharecropping in Bt cottonseed production in Gujarat, India”, has said that a new form of bondage, or forced labour, exists in North India’s Bt cottonseed farms, in which bhagiyas, or wage sharecroppers, are employed against advances and are then often required to work for years together “without regular payment of wages.”

  As would generally happen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s  tweet  – that not only was he “absolutely delighted” with the news of UNESCO tag to Dholavira, but he “ first visited ” the site during his “student days and was mesmerised by the place” – is being doubted by his detractors. None of the two tweets, strangely, even recalls once that it’s a Harappan site in Gujarat.

  Will the new report by well-known elite NGO Toxics Link create a ripple in the powerful corridors of Delhi? Titled “Quantitative analysis of microplastics along River Ganga”, forwarded to Counterview, doesn’t just say that Ganga is the second most polluted river in the world, next only to Yangtze (China). It goes ahead to do a comparison of microplastics pollution in three cities shows Varanasi – the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – is more  polluted compared to Kanpur and Haridwar.

A senior chartered accountant, whom I have known intimately (I am not naming him, as I don’t have his permission), has forwarded me an Indian Express (IE) story (July 18), “Ashwini Vaishnaw: The man in the chair”, which, he says, “contradicts” the blog (July 17), "Will Vaishnaw, close to Modi since Vajpayee days, ever be turnaround man for Railways?" I had written a day earlier and forwarded it to many of my friends. Written after taking extensive talks the reporters Liz Mathew and Aishwarya Mohanty appear to have had with BJP insiders and government officials (of course, all anonymous), I read through the IE story and sought a reaction from a former government official, who had also seen my blog and was happy about whatever I had written, doubting Vaishnaw would be a big success. The ex-government official, whom I forwarded the story, told me, while IE piece was surely presented a “positive side of Vaishnaw”, and that the new Railways-cut-IT minister is indeed a “very brig...

Gordhan Zadaphia While alerts were coming in over the last few days about a series of articles on how phones of “journalists, ministers, activists” may have been used to spy on them with the help of an Israeli project, Pegasus, finally, when I got up on Monday morning, I saw a Times of India story quoting (imagine!, we never used to do this, did just a followup in case we missed a story) the Wire, a top news portal on this providing some details, along with government reaction. While the first Wire story on Monday confines itself to journalists, including the news portal founder-editor Siddharth Varadarajan, pointing towards an “international collaborative reporting project” which establishes “the frightening extent to which governments around the world, including India, could be using surveillance tools in ways that have nothing to do with national security”, a friend in Australia, Neeraj Nanda, editor, South Asian Times, Melbourne, sent me a link of a “Guardian” story in the aftern...

Finally, at least one expert, top historian Ramachandra Guha, has spoken out on eviction of 200 families living in the Gandhi Ashram premises. Last week, I received an email alert from a veteran academic, Ashoke Chatterjee, former director, National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, which happens to be one of the most prestigious academic institutes of India based, informing me about it. NID is one of the several top institutes founded when Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s Prime Minister. The email alert by Chatterjee, who is also associated with several NGOs, including Centre for Social Justice and Janvakas, quotes Guha, stating how the eviction drive by the Gujarat government in order to build a hi fi Gandhi memorial reflects the challenges faced by a Trust, which is said to look after the Gandhi Ashram, especially in view of the fact it is “composed of ageing men and women, who all live in Gujarat, and thus cannot speak out for fear that they or their families will be victimized by...

Ever since he was appointed as railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, I was curious to know who he was and how did he come closer to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, most important, when. Hence, I decided to talk with some Sachivalaya officials in Gujarat in order to find out if there was, if any, Gujarat (or Modi) connection. I got particularly keen after I read in Free Press Journal (FPJ) that, a product of IIT, Vaishnaw “quit government service in 2008 and went to Wharton University in USA to pursue an MBA.” On his return, the daily said, “After working for top firms, he set up his own automotive components manufacturing units in Gujarat.” First, let me put the record straight. FPJ is wrong: he did not quit government service (or IAS) in 2008, as reported. He quit in 2010, after returning from Wharton, as the Hindustan Times reports . Apparently, he went to the US to do MBA, obviously after taking study leave from the Government of India, which is what many bureaucrats have done. Be t...

Jharkhand's Adivasi women  A lot is being written on Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest who is known more for his work for tribal rights in Jharkhand. His death at the age of 84, even when he was an under trial prisoner for his alleged involvement in the Bhima Koregaon violence three years go, has, not without reason, evoked sharp reaction, not just in India but across the world. Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, said, “Human Rights Defender and Jesuit priest Fr Stan Swamy has died in custody, nine months after his arrest on false charges of terrorism. Jailing Human Rights Defenders is inexcusable.” In India, human rights groups have been sharper, calling his death an “institutional murder”, stating, Modi-Shah regime is solely responsible for this. While there appears to be little to deny in what is being stated, I wondered how I had great difficulty in finding out who Fr Stan was six years ago. My friend, a senior civil society activist Ashok Shrimali, ...

Home minister Amit Shah, health minister Harsh Vardhan Don’t India’s top ministries – of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and of Home Affairs (MoHA) – tally data before releasing them? It would seem so… A few days back, I did a story in Counterview , based on an MoHA report, stating that Gujarat has the lowest sex rate at birth (SRB) at 901 girls as against 1000 births, followed by Assam (903), Madhya Pradesh (905) and Jammu & Kashmir (909), raising valid apprehensions that widescale female foeticide may be prevalent in India’s “model” State. Before I did the story, I had read a story in Gujarati daily “Sandesh”, which said that Gujarat was declared 100% Open Defecation Free in 2017, yet the claim turns out to be bogus in in the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 report, released recently by MoHFW, which said that 26% of households still defecate in the open and that the state had added just 10% new toilets at the time of the survey (2019). I asked senior journalist, Neelesh ...