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...