Top global NGO Amnesty International has demanded that the new BJP government in Gujarat must "prioritize and uphold human rights for all, including religious minorities and human rights defenders, who continue to face escalating repression and persecution."

Like in other sectors, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown have badly hit the learning ability of schoolchildren in Chhattisgarh, a recent fact-finding study report , jointly prepared by the non-profit Atmashakti Trust, the Dalit Adivasi Manch (DLM), a people's collective, and the Jana Jagaran Samiti, an NGO of Chhattisgarh, has said, insisting, the State government should prioritise its efforts to bridge learning gaps of children in government schools.

A top US official has slammed the Biden administration for failing to formally designate India as one of the world’s worst religious freedom offenders over the country’s appalling record of violations against religious minorities.

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. Ajay Shankar, Distinguished Fellow, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), in his keynote address at the Conference, jointly organised by the Centre for Financial Accountability, Indo-German Centre for Sustainability at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and Climate Trends, said, “Even if we don't achieve this, it will accelerate our transition to becoming a globally competitive green manufacturing economy - we could probably achieve it and afford it. There is a paradigm shift in terms of technologies and costs.” Held at IIT-Madras on December 6-7, 2022 and ...

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...

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an autonomous body of the US Government that tracks global religious persecutions, has urged the US Department of State to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC), which is America’s red list of the world’s worst offenders of religious freedoms. “Religious freedom and related human rights in India are under ongoing threat for a variety of reasons, including various government policies that do not protect religious minorities,” the USCIRF wrote in a report titled “Country Update: India” released on November 22 detailing the persecutions in the calendar year 2022.

The Learning Recovery Programme (LRP) has been taken up by the state government's Odisha School Education Programme Authority (OSEPA) to provide a learning opportunity to students to make up for losses in studies due to the closure of schools on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, lack of awareness among children and their parents and absence of robust monitoring have blocked its effective implementation, reveals a pilot fact-finding study conducted by the NGO Atmashakti Trust.

  A two-day conference, organised by three advocacy groups, the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA), Focus on Global South and Economic Research Foundation, has come down heavily on the Government of India for failing to recognise that the country is slipping into recession, insisting, the biggest hurdle is overcoming the dangers ahead is "lack of political will".

One of the United States’ biggest nonprofit newsrooms, The Texas Tribune , has run into controversy over the appointment of Sonal Shah as the organization’s chief executive officer because of her alleged links with the Vishwa Hindu, Parishad (VHP), whom diaspora rights groups call Hindu supremacist, citing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) categorizing it as a “religious militant organization”.

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...

In an important revelation, a Facebook post has revealed how, when Stalin continues to be "still worshipped by most of the Indian Communist parties", three Indian Communists became victims of  the Soviet dictator's oppressive regime. 

The WhatsApp Business account created particularly to download vaccine certificate for Covid-19 has sent a strange message. The message said, "Cheetahs reintroduced into Indian wildlife after many decades!  Take part in different activities for the Cheetah Reintroduction Project", then goes on to offer the link telling me to find out how the Cheetah relocation project was progressing. Strange, to say the least. Loving to do propaganda on every issue, spending crores, why the Government of India had to use the WhatsApp account for vaccine certificates for the Cheetah relocation project of all the things?  Difficult to gauge.  The link takes you to the following site:  https://www.mygov.in/home/334741/discuss/ Here is the screenshot:

Several civil rights groups in New Jersey have sought investigative and legal action from the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation against the Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP) and the Indian Business Association (IBA) for their roles in organizing what they called “an anti-Muslim hate parade in the state on August 14, 2022.”

An email  petition , floated by Mujahid Nafees, convener, Minority Coordination Committee (MCC), Gujarat, addressed to Gujarat chief minister Bhupendra Patel, has wondered why till now no action has been taken against the police personnel responsible for publicly flogging three youth belonging to the minority community.

Apartment building for resettlers  Claimed to have been brought from Bangladesh under the 2015 Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh, currently residing in two room apartments at Dinhata village-1 under Fakirtari Gram Panchayat, Cooch Behar district, a complaint filed by a senior human rights leader with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) chairman has said even seven years later the livelihood issues of some 58 families remains resolved.

Does the Gujarat government believe that what is called single use plastic – declared “banned” on July 1, 2022 eight years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi “exhorted” to do it on coming to power in 2014 – continues to be indiscriminately used thanks to “irresponsible consumers"? It would seem so, if the proceedings of a seminar organised by an environmental  NGO , in which middle-level state officials and industry representatives, participated. The Paryavaran Mitra-sponsored meet, held at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), saw officials from the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (Gujarat), admit, indeed without mincing words, that the plastic ban remains ineffective because of “lack of awareness” about it among the general public, even as refusing to take any responsibility for implementing the law. Blame-the-people salvo was fired by Pratik Patwari, Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI)...

  A civil society-sponsored meeting organised in Ahmedabad has admitted that the current ruling establishment in Gujarat as well as in India has been able to successfully create “delusion” around itself, strong enough to “deceive” large sections of people to pull them towards their side. Held ahead of the Gujarat state assembly polls, to be held in the state December 2022, the occasion was release of a Gujarati book titled “Sacchai Gujarat Ki” (Truth of Gujarat), authored by Hemant Shah, a top functionary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Addressed, among others, by former BJP chief minister Suresh Mehta (1995-96), who broke from the party in 2007 after differences with Narendra Modi, whom he served as industries and tourism minister in 2001-02, the meeting was held amidst murmur among the organisers that the BJP is likely to sweep the polls. “Aam Aadmi Party is unlikely to get more than five seats”, of the them, a senior activist, said, adding, “as the Congress, it...

In a surprise move, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a top  civil rights organization working to eliminate racial discrimination in the US, has voiced support for a demand to "investigate the links of several Hindu American organizations with India’s Hindu supremacist movement", especially Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

Marking 17 years of implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India, the civil rights group Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) has said that the law has empowered millions of people to seek information and hold the government accountable, yet a whopping 3,14,323 appeals and complaints were pending on June 30, 2022 in the 26 information commissions, from which the data was obtained. Under the RTI law, information commissions are the final appellate authority and are mandated to safeguard and facilitate people’s fundamental right to information. Information commissions (ICs) have been set up at the central level (Central Information Commission- CIC) and in the states (state information commissions- SICs). Based on information accessed under the RTI Act, the ‘ Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India, 2021-22’  examines the performance of all 29 commissions in India in terms of the number of appeals and complaints registered and disposed by them, num...

The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Gujarat unit, "strongly" condemning what it called "unconstitutional, illegal acts of certain personnel of the Gujarat Police who  publicly flogged persons of a particular community  in Undhela Village, Matar Taluka, Kheda District on October 3, 2022", has demanded that "an impartial departmental inquiry be conducted" against those who "perpetrated this dastardly crime." Insisting on "exemplary disciplinary action" be taken against the police personnel, in a statement, signed by Hemant Shah, Meenakshi Joshi, Michael Martin, Raghavan Rangarajan and Prasad Chacko, the PUCL said, "The persons who were flogged allegedly disrupted the performance of Navaratri Garba, which is an offence which would be investigated and the alleged offenders prosecuted as per law." However, it said, "the manner in which the police personnel took the law in their hands and flogged the alleged offender...

Urgewald, a non-profit environmental and human rights organization based in Sassenberg, Germany, has blamed the Narendra Modi government for “almost completely” dismantling environmental safeguards in the country’s mining law, allowing Coal India to go ahead with open-pit coal mines, “located in areas of rich biodiversity and on the lands of indigenous populations.” Stating that with 570 million tons, the China Energy Investment Corporation was the world’s top thermal coal producer in 2021, the global NGO asserts in a new report that Coal India “closely” follows the giant Chinese corporation, producing 557 million tons of thermal coal last year. Also noting that “the world’s largest coal mine developer is Coal India", it regrets, “ According to the company’s own projections, it aims to raise its coal production to 1 billion tons annually by 2025.” Coming up with  the 2022 update of the “Global Coal Exit List” (GCEL) , the report, released a month before the start of the COP27 Clim...

 A new report, seeking to study how the Indian state has allegedly weaponised the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) "against anyone who dares to challenge the Indian state and assert their fundamental rights to information, association, dissent and democracy", has said that the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is indiscriminately using the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as the "lead player in the abuse of UAPA." Published by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and authored by V Suresh, Madhura SB and Lekshmi Sujatha, the  report , titled "UAPA: Criminalising Dissent and State Terror: Study of UAPA Abuse in India, 2009 - 2022", released as part of its #RepealUAPA Campaign says that out of a total of 357 UAPA cases handled by NIA between the period 2009-August 2022, about 20% were registered and investigated during the Manmohan Singh led regime, while 80% were registered and investigated during the Modi government. Th...

In September third week, NREGA workers across the country were mobilised for two day so raise their issues and submit a memorandum to the Prime Minister. Organised the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha (NSM), a collective of groups that work with NREGA labourers across the country, workers from 13 states -- Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal -- carried out Kaam Do Abhiyaan, staging demonstrations and rallies against what they called blatant violation of law by the Central government in making NREGA payments.

In a surprise move, the Rajasthan police stopped a Dalit women's rally from Gujarat on the borders after it crossed Gujarat alleging that it would "disturb peace" in village Surana, Jalore district, where the gruesome incident of death of a Dalit boy took place on August 13 after he was brutally beaten up by his teacher on touching the drinking water pot. Sources said, while the Gujarat government had "no objection" in allowing the rally, which originated from the Dalit Shakti Kendra (DSK), an empowerment-cut-technical institute for teens founded by human rights leader Martin Macwan, on September 24 morning, the Rajasthan police stopped it for two and a half hours before allowing it to proceed to Surana. The decision to take out a women's rally was taken at a DSK meeting on September 5 following a condolence meeting of the NGO Navsarjan Trust, also founded by Macwan, activists committed to work against caste-based discrimination, organised to ...

A few days back, I received a message from one of the finest former Gujarat government bureaucrats, PG Ramrakhiani, a 1964 batch IAS official, who retired in November 2000. I would often interact with him in 1997-99, even later, after I was sent to Gandhinagar as a Times of India man to cover Sachivalaya. 

In sharp reaction to the recent attack on “Satanic Versus” author Salman Rushdie, organisations consisting of ex-Muslims, atheists and freethinkers from over 30 countries have celebrated dissent 2022 in Cologne, Germany, to coincide with  International Apostasy Day , a comprehensive report on the event sent as email alert to Counterview said. Held on August 20-21, the extraordinary event had 50 speakers, including scientist Richard Dawkins, activist Ensaf Haidar and actress and founder of Zina Foundation Nazmiye Oral. The two-day event, claim the organisers, was the largest gathering of ex-Muslim and freethought organizations and activists celebrating dissent and freedom. Organized by the  Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain  and  Freethought Lebanon  in  partnership  with Atheist Alliance International, Atheist Refugee Relief, Center for Inquiry, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Giordano Bruno Stiftung National Secular Society, Richard Dawkins Foundatio...