Counterview

By Feyzi Ismail*
The first two decades of the 21st century saw the return of mass movements to streets around the world. Partly a product of sinking confidence in mainstream politics, mass mobilisation has had a huge impact on both official politics and wider society, and protest has become the form of political expression to which millions of people turn.

By Sandeep Pandey*
Educational Institutions are meant to be places of learning and authorities managing them are expected to provide a liberal space where diversity of ideas can exist. Of course, this ideal is present at very few places but Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), before the Modi government came to power was one such place of international standing in India. It was comparable to the best institutions in the West in terms of their academic freedom, rigour and diversity.

By Anjali Bhardwaj, Amrita Johri*
The Central Information Commission (CIC) is without a Chief Information Commissioner once again. Chief Information Commissioner of the CIC, Sudhir Bhargava, retired on January 11, 2020. It was a routine retirement and his date of retirement was known from the time Bhargava took over as Chief. Despite this, the government failed to appoint the next Chief Information Commissioner in a timely manner and has allowed the CIC to become headless.

By Rajiv Shah
There was a time when we used to reject the Indian Constitution as "bourgeois". Those were the student days of early 1970s. Vigorous, youthful, though controversial. At that time, I used to be part of the Students Federation of India (SFI), CPI-M's student wing. We were told to believe by Delhi University party ideologues that the Constitution served the bourgeois-landlord state, led by the big bourgeoisie, which was in alliance with the imperialists.

Counterview Desk
Several human and civil rights lawyers of South Asian descent, expressing "grave concern" about alleged legal abuses and human rights atrocities in India, have said that “the crisis unfolding in India today is rooted in a long history of impunity and failed democratic institutions.”

Counterview Desk
Following dismissal of the curative petitions filed by two convicts in the December 2012 case, feminists from across the country issued a statement to appeal to the President of India to stop the execution of all four persons convicted in the case. The signatories included organisations working on women and children’s rights as well as queer and trans rights, disability, environment and other people’s movements.

By Bhaskar Sur*
Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

By Rajiv Shah
India appears to be competing with terrorist-stricken north-central African nation, Chad, in the number of internet shutdowns. In 2019, says a recent report, released by the UK-based top10vpn.com, which provides services meant to protect online privacy, India experienced 4,196 hours of internet shutdown, next only to Chad, with 4,728 hours of internet shutdown.

By Anand K Sahay*
The architect of the Russian Revolution, its master strategist and grand thinker, Vladimir Lenin, whose genius brought about a cataclysmic shift for the better part of a century in the affairs of most parts of the world, once observed that life was more “cunning” than any theory or plan we may devise.