Counterview.in

 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...

  Sectoral experts, academics and climate activists, deliberating on multiple issues related to Energy and Finance at the 4th annual Energy Finance Conference India, 2022 organised at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras, have asserted that India should have the national ambition of achieving net zero by 2047 at 100 years of Independence and in time to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees.

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...