The likely appointment of Atanu Chakraborty as HDFC Bank chairman interested me for several reasons, but above all because I have interacted with him closely during my more than 14 year stint in Gandhinagar for the “Times of India”. One of the few decent Gujarat cadre bureaucrats, Chakraborty, belonging to the 1985 IAS batch, at least till I covered Sachivalaya was surely above controversies. He loved to remain faceless, never desired publicity, was professional to the core, and never indulged in loose talk. When he neared retirement, which happened in April 2020, first there were rumours in Sachivalaya that he would be appointed SEBI chairman, and then there was talk he would be chairman (or was it CEO?) of Gujarat International Finance Tec (GIFT) City (a dream project of Narendra Modi as Gujarat chief minister, which as Prime Minister Modi wants to promote, come what may). But, for some strange reasons, and I don’t know why, none of this happened, despite the fact that he has been c...

  Did the Government of India come up with the three farm laws, first rushed by promulgating ordinances in June 2020, to not just open the country’s agricultural sector to the corporate sector but also as a precursor to comply with the requirements of the United States for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), as envisaged by the outgoing US president Donald Trump?

Amnesty International, which  shut down  its India branch after a recent move by the Enforcement Directorate to freeze the organisation’s accounts charging it with “violation” of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) and alleging money laundering, has sharply criticised the Australian government for “dangerously” downplaying human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in a recent report.

Land rise because of lignite mining (left), district officials' visit (right) Gujarat’s well-known environmentalists Rohit Prajapati and Krishnakant of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS), in a letter to the Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India and the Gujarat chief secretary and other concerned officials, have regretted that a month after their complaint about a disaster at the Badi-Hoidad lignite mining site, Bhavnagar district, on November 16, authorities have taken no follow-up action to ascertain the reasons and take remedial steps.

A uniform letter, sent by a large number of environmental experts from across India to T Haque, chairman, Experts Assessment Commission (EAC) under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India (GoI), has expressed shock over the submission of a fresh revised proposal on the Central Vista project in Delhi for approval, calling the move “arbitrarily”.

  Alleging that untreated industrial effluents continue to be dumped in Mahisagar, one of the major rivers of Central Gujarat, well-known environmentalists Rohit Prajapati and Krishnakant of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS) in a letter to senior officials of the state government have said, their spot inquiry suggests things have not changed despite the fact that they had brought the matter before the authorities in a letter dated November 14 with concrete evidence.

  Taking strong exception to the Gujarat government’s alleged preventive detentions of a large number of farmer leaders this week in order to stop them from holding any protests in support of the Bharat bandh on December 8, a legal notice served on chief minister Vijay Rupani, the home minister, the chief secretary, the director general of police, and other senior police officials has sought know under which law these “illegal” actions were being carried out.

Are the tribal women of Devgadh Baria, an eastern-most hilly taluka of Gujarat, coming out of their long-standing fear and beginning to speak up? It would seem so, if a public hearing organised by civil rights organizations Anandi and Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel (MAGP) next to the office of the sub-divisional magistrate (DSM) on December 10, International Human Rights Day, was any indication.

A National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) tracker by a civil society network, Peoples’ Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG), has found that where was a surge in NREGA work demand during the pandemic, with the total job cards demand this year reaching 7.5 crore and the total active job cards 9.02 crore.

Captain Sanjit  Pushkar Raj, who at some point was national general secretary of India’s premier human rights organisation, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), currently settled in Melbourne, sent an email to me seeking my mobile number. I promptly sent it across, and within no time, he phoned me up.  One who has been writing for Counterview.in now and on about national issues, Raj’s concern this time was Captain Sanjit Bhattacharya’s fate, whom he called “missing”, even though at least two of the documents he shared on WhatsApp – one of them signed by President Pranab Mukherjee – sought to “presume” he had passed away in 2004. On duty along the Rann of Kutch, Bhattacharya – a Raj colleague at the SS-54 Officers Training Academy at the then Madras (as his article  said) – went missing on the night of April 19-20, 1997 following a sudden flood, when, ,because of an unpredictable tide, the Rann turned treacherous, in which the Captain was possibly swept to the other...

  A study carried out by the Right to Food Campaign and the Center for Equity Studies in 11 states has found that even five months after the lockdown has ended, a large number of households report lower levels of income (62%), reduced intake of cereals (53%), pulses (64%), vegetables (73%) and eggs/non-vegetarian items (71%), worsened nutritional quality (71%) and an increased need to borrow money to buy food (45%).

A report by multinational advocacy groups, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), Bangkok, and South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), Kathmandu, “Human Rights in South Asia in Times of Pandemic”, has expressed concern that lack of basic health infrastructure has been one of the main reasons why the countries in the region are unable to fight Covid-19 crisis effectively.

A recent compilation has revealed that at least 193 people have been killed due to illegal sand mining operations across across India since January 2019. Compiled in a detailed  report  by Bhim Singh Rawat of the civil rights organization South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), it says that the highest number of people, 95 were killed in North India (49%) followed by 42 in West and Central India, 41 in East India and 15 in South India.

A well-known Jharkhand civil rights organization has blamed the Maharashtra government for failing to ensure “basic rights” 83-year-old Father Stan Swamy, a state human rights activist, currently lodged as an undertrial in Mumbai’s Taloja jail. In a letter to state chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, it regretted, the jail authorities only provided with a sipper to the human rights activist, suffering from Parkinson’s “on November 29 after widespread condemnation from all quarters.”

Natubhai Parmar showing plastic extracted from a dead cow's womb After a long, long time, Natubhai Parmar, a grassroots Dalit rights activist based in Surendranagar in Gujarat, rang me up. I was pleasantly surprised. I have known him for the last about eight years. Though we used to talk on phone, and met once in a while in Ahmedabad to do stories on Dalit issues, it was only after the famous Una flogging incident in 2016 that I found how deep his understanding is on Dalit issues.  The Una incident – in which four Dalit boys were tied to chain attached with an SUV and were pushed towards the local police station on the main road, even as cow vigilantes flogged them mercilessly all the way – led to a huge turmoil among Gujarat Dalits. Dalit rights leader Jignesh Mevani, currently independent MLA, became famous following an Ahmedabad to Una march he organised to protest against the flogging. As the cow vigilantes flogged the four Dalit boys on suspicion of cow slaughter, many Dalit...

Australian Greens Senator Janet Rice, speaking in Parliament, has demanded the resignation of the country’s High Commissioner in India, Barry O'Farrell, for visiting the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on November 15, alleging, the saffron organization is “fascist”, and has “openly” declared admiration for “Adolf Hitler and the genocide of Nazi regime.”

  A public hearing, organised by the Delhi Rozi Roti Adhikar Abhiyan (DRRAA) to highlight the crisis of food insecurity and hunger among the working poor and marginalised communities in India’s national capital, highlighted how economic distress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with the inadequate response by the government, resulted in people being unable to find adequate work to be able to afford food.

  A new book, published by the New York-based Monthly Press Review (MPR), has blamed Microsoft founder Bill Gates for “crowning” the crisis allegedly engulfing India’s health sector, stating, the top American billionaire’s foundation of late has acquired “extraordinary influence" over India’s public health governance,  giving a fillip to a policy that deprives access of public healthcare facilities for majority of the country’s population.

  On November 8, Counterview.in carried an  article  titled “Pump and dump strategy? Erosion of GSFC's Rs 250 crore investment in Canadian firm”, by a 1975 batch IAS bureaucrat, who was called a “turnaround man” by the Times of India way back in 2006. The article is based a letter he wrote to Gujarat chief secretary Anil Mukim protesting against a 2013 Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals investment of Rs 250 crore in Canadian firm Karnalyte in 2013, whose value has now fallen to Rs 10 crore! Based on the article – which argues that the PSU investment was allegedly made without taking into account the Canadian firm’s profile the for production and supply of potash, facing glut in the international market – the “Indian Express” carried a  follow-up  on November 10, even as quoting GSFC CMD Arvind Agrawal as stating he had not seen the letter, as it “is very long”, adding, “It is a seven-year-old matter and there is no point in going in, digging (sic!).” T...

  Bloomberg, a well-known financial, software, data and media company headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, has said that India’s GDP for 2020 would slip to –10.3%, in comparison to three of its immediate neighbours, China 1.9%, Pakistan –0.4, and Bangladesh 3.8%. The GDP comparison comes in a Bloomberg report of 53 countries in its Covid Resilience Ranking.

Ahmed Patel has passed away. It is indeed sad that he became another Covid victim, like thousands of others across the world. His loss appears to have been particularly felt in the Congress corridors. I know how some party leaders from Gujarat would often defend him even if one “negative” remark was made on him. “I personally cannot tolerate any criticism of Ahmedbhai”, Shaktisinh Gohil, Rajya Sabha MP from Gujarat, appointed Bihar in charge ahead of recent assembly polls, told me about a couple of years ago during a tete-e-tete in Ahmedabad.  I have known Ahmedbhai, though not intimately. The first time I met him was in Gandhinagar. It was 1997, when the BJP hadn’t yet taken over. The elections were to take place in December. Just posted as the Times of India reporter to cover government, I was called for a dinner at a very ordinary government-owned flat in Sector 16 where former Congress minister Urvashi Devi who later switched over to BJP, but now is not with any party, used to ...

Inside IAS academy, Mussoori The other day, I was talking to a former colleague of the Times of India, Ahmedabad. I have known him as one of the reasonable and rational journalists. He later served in a TV. When in TV, he would often tell me anecdotes of how they would report events if they failed to reach the spot on time: “We would just say, here the attack took place, and that was the place from where the attackers attacked.”  On phone for a little more than a half an hour, we talked a bit about how the Modi government was seeking to sideline IAS across India, who, I have always believed, despite their constraints (as serve they must the powers-that-be), are broadly wedded to the Constitution of India, something they are groomed for at the IAS academy in Mussourie. While I told him that my interaction with most IAS bureaucrats – which was direct and live till early 2013 when I retired from the Times of India as political editor, Ahmedabad, stationed in Gandhinagar – suggested th...

It was such a pleasure reading a Facebook post. Rajiv Tyagi is former Indian Air Force squadron, His profile describes him as “politically promiscuous anti-fascist dissident, brain defogger, atheist, adventurer, empath, humanist”. This is what says in his post : “Sanskrit for all practical purposes is a dead horse. No amount of flogging will make it pull a political cart any longer.”  It takes me back to the days when I started covering Gujarat Sachivalaya in 1997. It was, I think 1999, if I am not mistaken. Then education minister Anandiben Patel, currently Uttar Pradesh governor and a known Narendra Modi protege, told me, “We don’t need English, we need Sanskrit.” But before recalling all of it, let me first reproduce what Tyagi has to say about Sanskrit: “Even when it was in currency, it was never the language of the people. Sanskrit was like the silly k-language that schoolkids make up within their gang, by adding a k sound before every syllable, to make themselves unintelligib...

Digital bank N26, based in Berlin, known to be offering services to customers to manage their bank account online and from their smartphone in real-time in Europe and USA, has ranked India 76th among 100 countries it has analysed in order to measure female opportunity and achievement around the world in the light on gender equality in business, government and society. In a study, “The Female Opportunity Index 2020/21”, published  online , N26 takes into account several categories to rank the selected 100 countries – including women in government, women in management, women in entrepreneurship, women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), salary level and gender wage gap, equal pay day, female access to education, women's legislation, and maternal leave. Among comparable countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, also known as BRICS, India is ranked the worst. Brazil ranks 38th, followed by Russia 55th, South Africa 62nd and China 74th (one bit better t...

In a surprise move, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti Urdu Arabi Farsi University at Lucknow has conferred honorary D Litt on RSS leader Indresh Kumar, who was an accused in a 2007 bomb blast incident at the Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti Dargah in Ajmer, and an accused in the murder of another Hindutva worker Sunil Joshi.

  A new book, “Sustainable Development in India: A Comparison with the G-20”, authored by Dr Keshab Chandra Mandal, has regretted that though India’s GDP has doubled over the last one decade, its human development indicators are worse than not just developed countries of the Group of 20 countries but also developing countries who its members.

NGO campaign against witchcraft in Dahod  In a gruesome incident, a migrant tribal woman worker has been allegedly set on fire after being suspected of being a witchcraft in Virnagar village, Jasdan taluka, of Rajkot district, Gujarat. The incident took place on November 18, when the three men and a woman tried to kill the victim in front of her husband under the suspicion that she was practising witchcraft.

Mahurkar at GMC meet On November 18 evening, the Gujarat Media Club (GMC) organised a felicitation function for Uday Mahurkar, a long-time journalist with “India Today”, as the new information commissioner of the Central Information Commission, the Right to Information (RTI) watchdog of the Government of India. There were two reasons why I decided avoiding the meed (I conveyed it on WhatsApp that I wouldn’t attending).  The first was, of course, the pandemic, though GMC claimed it would do everything to ensure that “enough precautions” would be taken. And the second was, I have found myself a misfit in such ceremonies – I get bored, often lost, sit among the back benches, talking around with those sitting next by me. Surely, it was different when I had to attend some of such ceremonial functions in Gandhinagar as part of my duty as the Times of India reporter. Yet, I decided to watch the function on Facebook live – a link was sent by GMC on WhatsApp. What surprised me was, a maximu...

As many as 23 members of the Hindu Voices for Peace (HVP), including the founder president of the well-known Haridwar-based Matri Sadan Ashram, Swami Shivananda Saraswati, and a one of its top monks, Brahmachari Aatmabodhanand, have expressed their “dismay” over the arrest of Khudai Khidmatdar chief Faisal Khan and three others on charges of “promoting enmity between religions” and “defiling a place of worship” after they offered namaz in Mathura’s Nand Baba temple premises on October 29.

A top conservation and environment news features service has warned that a large scale shift to electric vehicles (EV) “may not be as environment friendly as it seems”, pointing towards “concerns” over lack of solid plan for “this shift and in absence of a plan for integrating renewables to power.”

Welcoming the  modified  National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) advisory titled “Human Rights Advisory on Rights of Women in the Context of Covid19”, feminist and women’s rights collectives and organizations have lauded NHRC for “proactively taking on board the diverse and even contradictory view points that emerged in response to the specific sections related to sex workers.”

Finn's Weaver  The Government of India has been pushing out “misleading” data on the country’s drastic wildlife decline, says a well-researched report, pointing towards how top ministers are hiding data on biodiversity losses, even as obfuscating its own data. It quotes “State of India’s Birds Report 2020” to note that of the 261 out of 867 bird species for which long-term trends could be determined, 52% have declined since the year 2000, with 22% declining strongly.

Gujarat’s civil rights organization, Minority Coordination Committee (MCC), has regretted that the state government has refused to observe November 11 as the National Education Day, celebrated every year in the memory of India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s contribution in the field of education.

Dushyant Dave, SA Bobde  Did Supreme Court chief justice SA Bobde ignore a suggestion to allow Reliance Jio as “better platform” for virtual hearings during the pandemic? It would seem so, if the controversial  letter , authored by Dushyant Dave, president, Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), to the apex court secretary-general protesting against what he calls “extraordinary urgency” in listing the special leave petition filed on behalf of Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami is any guide.

I am a little confused. How does one describe the arrest of Republic TV anchor Arnab Goswami? Most top newspapers, even as stating that they disagree with Arnab’s style of “journalism”, have condemned it, and so has the Editors’ Guild, which is headed by Seema Mustafa, founder of left-of-centre site thecitizen.in. A Republic TV insider suggested me, refusing to directly defend Arnab, that it all started with “clash of ego” between Arnab and the Mumbai Police Commissioner.  No doubt, Arnab’s way of interpreting things – whether it was the arrest of journalists across India, or of activists allegedly involved in the Bhima Koregaon violence, or for that matter of students and ex-students, even women, participating in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) movement – were highly objectionable. It appeared to me, as did to many other journalists, that he was defending the authoritarian hand of the government. Arnab even took the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Central Bureau o...