Can “annihilation of caste” also break the oppressive shackles of women? A recent lecture by  V Geetha , eminent feminist writer and social historian, has suggested there is no such one-to-one relationship between the two. Belonging to Chennai, Geetha was in Ahmedabad to deliver a lecture “Dravidan and Different? What Women Writers Have to Say”, where she suggested that the powerful Dravidian anti-Brahminical movement in Tamil Nadu hasn’t led to simultaneous liberation of women. In Ahmedabad for the Umashankar Joshi memorial lecture, organised by the Gangotri Trust, Geetha told the audience that the farthest the Dravidian polity went, even as engaging with caste and Brahminism, was under the AIADMK’s chief ministership of J Jayalalitha, who confined herself to “productive welfarism of women.” Answering a query from Counterview, she said, the present DMK government is pursuing the same polity – of “protecting” women and offering welfare measures for them, instead of standing u...

I visited Modhera, a historical site of abandoned sun temple, built in the 11th century, the other day with family friends who had come from New Jersey. Situated about 100 from Ahmedabad, I got interested in how the expert guide had sought to identify its destruction.

Elections in Gujarat are over. Ever since the they were announced, I was being asked what would be the outcome, whether Aam Aadmi Party will become a major force. My answer was straight and simple: AAP will cut into Congress votes, but it would be its victory if it crosses the double digit mark. Since the votes between AAP and Congress will be divided, in terms of number of seats, BJP, which got 99 out of 182 seats will jump its numbers to around 135, and as for the Congress, it will be around 35. However, I also believe that this time it is not important how many seats the Congress or AAP are able to get, because as seen last time, a large number of its MLAs, even leaders, left the party and joined BJP, thanks to political machinations of Union home minister Amit Shah. So, even if you vote for the Congress, you never know if the winning candidate will switch over to the BJP. I strong think this time it would be better to see what percentage of votes the opposition parties together ar...

  Claiming that there has been "no comprehensive analysis of media reporting and commentary” on the “developments” following the passage of the Citizens Amendment Act (CAA), and the February 2020 communal violence" in Delhi, a recent report, in an analysis of debates aired on the six most watched news channels from December 2019 to February 2020, has said there was “a similarity in rhetoric, positioning and language” to air “prejudice and suspicion against the Muslim community.” There was a concerted attempt on the part of these channels -- Republic TV and Times Now which are English channels, and Aaj Tak, Zee News, India TV, and Republic Bharat -- to frame the issues around the CAA as Hindus versus Muslims with Muslims being portrayed as “troublemakers” or “ungrateful citizens”, or people whose actions were “antithetical to national interest”, the report, titled “Troubling Dualities: News Media as Arbiter of Fact or Platform of Hate?”, alleges. Forming part of a larger  stud...

AK Joti, Shalini Randeria, Pratap Bhanu Mehta I posted the link  of my Counterview  blog  titled "Nothing wrong in calling Amit Shah, but will this top school also call Rahul or Kejriwal?" on a Facebook group  called  Sardar Patel Vidyalaya Friends of which I am also supposed to be a member. I say supposed to be because no sooner I posted the blog, it was removed -- straightaway.  The message removing the blog said the an admin had removed it. I don't know which one, but it sounded strange, to say the least. I wrote in my blog that the spirit of free, democratic thinking of SPV shouldn't stop at asking Amit Shah, Union Home Minister, to address the children. Why not also call a Rahul Gandhi or an Arvind Kejriwal too? This made me scan through the FB's SPV group. While most posts were of general nature, a few of them were politically inspired. The entire speech of Amit Shah found its way -- as uploaded by the Haryana BJP -- in the group. There was another po...

 A letter, reportedly signed by group of former students from the school in which I spent 12 long years – from the nursery to the 11th -- New Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya (SVP) took me back to my SPV days, late 1950s and the entire decade of 1960s. In the “open letter”, which has been published in full in  The Wire  a day after the news agency PTI  released  a news on it, the 300 plus signatories, all school alumni, question the decision to invite Union home minister Amit Shah to the school as chief guest on the Sardar Patel Jayanti, which fell on October 31. Founded by HM Patel, I was a little saddened to see that there is little on the  SPV’s site  about the school’s history – except a mere  56 seconds video . A known right-winger who joined the Swatantra Party some time in 1960s, HM Patel was close to Sardar Patel, but was out-and-out secularist and a democrat. One who became civil servant before the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) was fo...

  It was indeed a treat to listen to Bhavik Raja, who spoke at a meeting of the Movement for Secular Democracy the other day in Ahmedabad. Speaking in chaste Gujarati, Raja recalled his childhood days in Mobi when he and his friends would often go to the town's Jhulto Pul (Hanging Bridge) in free time. I listened to him online. The bridge, which should have been given a heritage status, was handed over to the owners of a watch-making tycoon for repair. The repair was carried out so shoddily that it broke down in less than a week after it was opened for general public, leading to the death of more than 140 persons, many of them children. Raja, who formed a group of three-person activists' team on a fact-finding mission to Mobi, said, what isn't taken note of is how tens of youth, belonging to the local Muslim fishing community, jumped into the river and saved many, many lives. It's a marshy river, and to navigate in there is an extremely difficult exercise. Acording to R...

The WhatsApp Business account created particularly to download vaccine certificate for Covid-19 has sent a strange message. The message said, "Cheetahs reintroduced into Indian wildlife after many decades!  Take part in different activities for the Cheetah Reintroduction Project", then goes on to offer the link telling me to find out how the Cheetah relocation project was progressing. Strange, to say the least. Loving to do propaganda on every issue, spending crores, why the Government of India had to use the WhatsApp account for vaccine certificates for the Cheetah relocation project of all the things?  Difficult to gauge.  The link takes you to the following site:  https://www.mygov.in/home/334741/discuss/ Here is the screenshot:

  Does the Gujarat government believe that what is called single use plastic – declared “banned” on July 1, 2022 eight years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi “exhorted” to do it on coming to power in 2014 – continues to be indiscriminately used thanks to “irresponsible consumers"? It would seem so, if the proceedings of a seminar organised by an environmental  NGO , in which middle-level state officials and industry representatives, participated. The Paryavaran Mitra-sponsored meet, held at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), saw officials from the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (Gujarat), admit, indeed without mincing words, that the plastic ban remains ineffective because of “lack of awareness” about it among the general public, even as refusing to take any responsibility for implementing the law. Blame-the-people salvo was fired by Pratik Patwari, Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry ...

  A civil society-sponsored meeting organised in Ahmedabad has admitted that the current ruling establishment in Gujarat as well as in India has been able to successfully create “delusion” around itself, strong enough to “deceive” large sections of people to pull them towards their side. Held ahead of the Gujarat state assembly polls, to be held in the state December 2022, the occasion was release of a Gujarati book titled “Sacchai Gujarat Ki” (Truth of Gujarat), authored by Hemant Shah, a top functionary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Addressed, among others, by former BJP chief minister Suresh Mehta (1995-96), who broke from the party in 2007 after differences with Narendra Modi, whom he served as industries and tourism minister in 2001-02, the meeting was held amidst murmur among the organisers that the BJP is likely to sweep the polls. “Aam Aadmi Party is unlikely to get more than five seats”, of the them, a senior activist, said, adding, “as the Congress, it...

Urgewald, a non-profit environmental and human rights organization based in Sassenberg, Germany, has blamed the Narendra Modi government for “almost completely” dismantling environmental safeguards in the country’s mining law, allowing Coal India to go ahead with open-pit coal mines, “located in areas of rich biodiversity and on the lands of indigenous populations.” Stating that with 570 million tons, the China Energy Investment Corporation was the world’s top thermal coal producer in 2021, the global NGO asserts in a new report that Coal India “closely” follows the giant Chinese corporation, producing 557 million tons of thermal coal last year. Also noting that “the world’s largest coal mine developer is Coal India", it regrets, “ According to the company’s own projections, it aims to raise its coal production to 1 billion tons annually by 2025.” Coming up with  the 2022 update of the “Global Coal Exit List” (GCEL) , the report, released a month before the start of the COP27 Clim...

  A new report, seeking to study how the Indian state has allegedly weaponised the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) "against anyone who dares to challenge the Indian state and assert their fundamental rights to information, association, dissent and democracy", has said that the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is indiscriminately using the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as the "lead player in the abuse of UAPA."

A few days back, I received a message from one of the finest former Gujarat government bureaucrats, PG Ramrakhiani, a 1964 batch IAS official, who retired in November 2000. I would often interact with him in 1997-99, even later, after I was sent to Gandhinagar as a Times of India man to cover Sachivalaya. 

A new study has blamed the Government of India (GoI) for seeking to create “inviolate spaces” -- spaces devoid of human presence -- in the core areas of the country’s 53 tiger reserves, thus allegedly undermining the forest rights of the communities residing in these areas for centuries. At the same time, it notes, ironically, the GoI  is acting fast to implement of “big and small linear infrastructure projects” within their vicinity in the name of development, "adversely affecting" the tiger reserves.

It was amusing to see Congress reaction to Prime Minister Narendra Modi omitting the name of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru from the names of those who fought for India's freedom. Of all persons, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said, the party "will oppose the wrong statements made on historical facts for political benefits and every attempt to question great national leaders like Gandhi-Nehru-Patel-Azad on the basis of lies.” Ironic though it may seem, whatever I know of Congress, its leaders or cadres (whatever they are left, now) have paid scant respect to the "Gandhi-Nehru-Patel-Azad" legacy. My visits to Congress office in Ahmedabad as also offices and residences of party leaders has made me firmly believe: they don't care about the foursome Sonia has sought to identify. In fact, visit any of these places, and you will only see photos of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and (now) Priyanka Gandhi -- as if the four towering persons didn't exis...

 In a move which may raise many an eyebrow, a Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi-supported child rights NGO has celebrated Prime Minister Narendra Modi-intitiated Har Ghar Tiranga by commemorating 75 freedom fighters by "narrating their famous deeds and chanting slogans of each leader", including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Lala Lajpat Rai and a person who had little or nothing common with the freedom movement -- RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.

  Noticing the emergence of a novel trend, a just-released report based on a fact-finding team's observations following its interaction in particular with Hindu and Muslim political activists, administrators and police officials, has claimed that a major reason why chasm between the two communities in Gujarat has lately reached new heights is, a veritable competition between Hindu right-wing groups and leaders to capture the existing communal space. Titled "Hindu Right, Communal Riots and Demolitions: Emerging Pattern of Communal Riots in India", the  report  has been prepared against the backdrop of what it calls "low intensity" communalism which has characterised rioting in Gujarat in the recent past, especially after the 2002 communal carnage, one of the worst in Independent India. Especially focusing on riots in two Gujarat towns, Himmatnagar and Khambhat, which took place on April 10, the day clashes broke also out in different parts of India on the occasio...

  Gujarat’s top Dalit rights leader Martin Macwan, who is currently leading a week-long procession to Delhi carrying a 1,111 kg brass coin with the pointed question embossed on it, “Will the 1947 dream of untouchability free India be a reality in 2047?”, has reiterated that the removal of untouchability in India is Dalits’ primary concern, and not opposition to the new Parliament building. The march began in Ahmedabad on August 1 at 8:00 am amidst refusal of the Gujarat police a day earlier refusing to give the permission for the procession, which involves a small truck carrying the huge brass coin, another one with an Ambedkar statue, two trucks full of about 25 lakh one rupee coins donated by Dalits across India, and six buses with 300 Dalit activists. The brass coin has the image of BR Ambedkar on one side, and of Lord Buddha, on the other. Starting at the Dalit Shakti Kendra (DSK), founded by Macwan to provide technical-cum-empowerment training to the underprivileged teens off ...

   A civil society tracker, seeking to periodically analyse the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), has said that NREGA budgetary allocation is only 0.29% of GDP and 1.85% of the total government expenditure of the financial year 2022-23, which is grossly inadequate. Thus, “As per estimates of researchers of the World Bank, for NREGA to run robustly, its allocation must at least be 1.6% of the GDP.”

A couple of days after I did a story in Counterview titled "Why Gujarat Dalits want huge brass coin placed in new Parliament building base" ( April 17, 2022 ) the person who had conceptualised the unique 1000-kg brass coin idea, Martin Macwan, a well-known human rights leader, phoned me up to find out why dominant newspapers had “ignored” the event. Indeed, none of the two major papers which come out of Gujarat, “The Times of India” and the “Indian Express” wrote a word about it. The big brass coin has been prepared with the help of three Dalit artists – one from Odisha and two from Delhi – who have been involved gold plating the Somnath temple. Lord Buddha on one side, and Baba Ambedkar on the other, along with the big coin, a large number of small one foot coins have also been minted – all from about 2,700 kg brass utensils donated largely by Dalits in Gujarat’s around 750 villages, as also a dozen other states across India. Embossed is the writeup on each of them: Will Ind...