By Our Representative A fact-finding report, prepared after its recent visit to Hathras, has said that ever since the gruesome grangrape incident in Uttar Pradesh on September 14, the victim’s family has had to fight its “battle amidst feudal-casteist environs and politics” in which it is being forced to operate. Worse, hurdles were created for those who seeking to give a supporting hand the family. The victim (identified by the team as Dasya), died in a Delhi hospital a fortnight later.

Counterview Desk
Objecting to the use of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) against Amnesty International, forcing the top NGO to close its office in India, and the arrest human rights activists, especially 83-year-old Fr Stan Swamy, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has asked the Government of India to safeguard the rights of human rights defenders and NGOs, and their ability to carry out their crucial work on behalf the groups they represent.

By Our Representative
A recent survey, carried out by the Centre for Labour Research and Action (CLRA), a civil rights organization, of cottonseed plots in Danta taluka of Banaskantha district has claimed that tribal children continue to be employed in large numbers for cross pollination work in cottonseed production in Gujarat. While some of the children belong to the farmer households, other children are hired for wages as the pollination work is labour intensive.

Counterview Desk
A statement signed by nearly 12,000 women’s rights activists and organizations across India, “Sex Workers have Human Rights too”, has taken strong exception to by a letter by Sunitha Krishnan and her organisation, Prajwala, to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which seeks to reduce sex workers to hapless victims of violence and not citizens entitled to rights.

By Vikash Narain Rai*
After the #BlackLifeMatters movement seriously tested the credibility of police across America, the Houston police chief Art Acevado talked of ending “lawful but awful” policing. No comparison, but in India, a citizens’ committee comprising former top judges and bureaucrats is now set to inquire into the role of the state machinery and media in handling the February 2020 Delhi violence, which followed protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), “as the investigation by the Delhi Police has evoked extensive critical commentary in recent times.”

By Kabita Ghosh, Arup Mitra*
There is a strong view that western feminism made the world aware of gender equality and talked about women empowerment openly. Some of the Indian women writers dealing with gender issues contested this view through their writings and held that western feminism may have influenced the feminist movement in India, giving it a concrete shape, but to say that it made India fight for equality is rather an exaggeration.

By Moin Qazi*
Human civilisation has always believed that there is something primal about the need for privacy, for secrecy, for personal space. This has, in the world of some judicial authorities, taken to mean “the right to be let alone”-- that is, the right to privacy. They believe “privacy is the beginning of all freedom”.

By Rajiv Shah
A new book, “India’s Scheduled Areas”, has gone a long way to suggest that the contradictions between two diametrically opposite views during the “intensive discussions and debates” at the Constituent Assembly on what policy to adopt towards India’s tribal areas – whether to see them as regions with distinct identity or now – continues to this day.

By Nandini Oza*
The news of the passing away of one of the senior-most members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) Jagannath (Kaka) Patidar at the age of 93 seemed as if the foundation of the movement itself has been shaken. There is no hesitation in saying that Jagannath (bhai) Patidar, popularly known as “Kaka” and his family is the first family of the NBA. Hardly anyone in the plains of Nimad, Madhya Pradesh (MP), must have opposed the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) for over five decades with the kind of resilience as that of Kaka.