Counterview

By Shabnam Hashmi*  I was shocked to read a statement sent to me by a journalist friend. Mufti Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar, General Secretary of the Samastha Kerala Jam’iyyathul Ulama, has called for women to remain confined to their homes and suggested that women’s presence on public platforms causes “great destruction.”

By A Representative   The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has proposed a red hexagonal warning label for packaged foods high in sugar, salt and saturated fat, following a series of directions from the Supreme Court. While the move could mark an important step towards helping consumers identify unhealthy packaged foods, public-health advocates say the proposal contains five significant loopholes that could substantially weaken its impact.

By Raj Kumar Sinha*  The Himalayas are the world’s youngest and one of its most geologically unstable mountain ranges. Earthquakes, landslides and glacier melt are deeply interconnected here. The glacier-related disaster along the Nepal–Tibet border on August 26, 2026, highlights climate change as one of the key factors behind the growing risks in the region.

By Neha Desai*  The Nepal Disaster as Context On or around August 26, 2026, a large section of glacier and rock collapsed high in the Himalayas near the Nepal–China (Tibet) border, in the Langtang Lirung–Lhende area. The collapse triggered a powerful ice-rock avalanche and debris flow that surged downstream along the Lhende, Bhote Koshi, and Trishuli river system. The torrent of mud, rock, ice, and water destroyed villages, roads, bridges, and hydropower infrastructure across tens of kilometres, with impacts felt far downstream.

By Wangchuk Tsering*  The mountains of Arunachal Pradesh are not empty spaces waiting to be transformed into reservoirs, tunnels, and concrete structures. They are living landscapes—home to indigenous communities, ancient forests, sacred rivers, and generations of people whose identities are deeply connected to the land. Today, many communities across the state live with growing anxiety as large hydropower projects continue to move forward in one of the most fragile ecological regions on Earth. 

By Aravind Yadappanavar*  Rajasthan’s government-school network is trapped in a profound systemic paradox. While student enrolment has steadily eroded, the state continues to wrestle with a crippling deficit of basic infrastructure, hazardous school structures, severe teacher-deployment distortions, and a glaring absence of basic utilities. In rural and desert outposts, the reality of public education unfolds not in equipped classrooms, but under rusted tin sheets, beneath the shade of trees, inside cramped rented rooms, and occasionally within animal sheds. In some habitations, school gates remain locked entirely.

By Nava Thakuria*  Developments in northeastern India have brought the issue of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) back into public discussion, with developments in Manipur and Assam placing questions of migration, citizenship verification and demographic change at the centre of the debate.

By A Representative   The civil rights group, Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA), has announced its full support for the Ladakh Peace and Justice March, a foot march from Kargil to Leh scheduled from September 10 to 24, with the organisers calling for the inclusion of Ladakh in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, full statehood for the Union Territory and justice for the victims of the September 24, 2025 incident in Leh. The announcement followed a meeting of the KDA attended by its Co-Chairmen Asgar Ali Karbalai and Sajjad Kargili, members of the alliance and other concerned stakeholders. Ladakh MP Hanifa Jan was also present at the meeting.

By  Prem Singh  U.R. Ananthamurthy’s "Samskara" (1965) stands as a landmark of modern Indian literature. Set in a decaying Brahmin village in Karnataka, the novel dissects the moral crisis of orthodox Hindu society through the story of Praneshacharya, a revered scholar who breaks caste taboos. Yet for all its radical questioning of Brahminical ritual and hierarchy, the novel remains strikingly conservative in its treatment of women—an irony that becomes especially pronounced when viewed through the lens of Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist-feminist philosophy.

By Harsh Thakor*  'A Life Well Swum' by Graeme Lowe is a compelling memoir that explores the fascinating world of long-distance swimming and serves as a beautiful reminder that swimming is a wonderful way of experiencing the world. Lowe, who lives in Jersey with his wife Liz where the sea is never far away, initially aspired only to get fit, but swimming a few lengths in the local pool rekindled memories of an unfulfilled childhood ambition: to swim the English Channel. What follows is a lifetime of aquatic adventures chronicled with honesty and warmth, navigating his journey into the world of long-distance swimming from dolphins off Catalina to jellyfish in the North Channel. It is a narration of cold, fatigue and friendships forged through shared challenges, conveying that the most challenging part of the mission is not always the swimming itself, but the decisions and doubts that precede it.

By Rajiv Shah   A few days back, I happened to attend an interesting conversation among a group of young Indian Americans in Los Angeles. The theme proposed a deceptively simple proposition: can caste travel with people who leave India? The answer, the discussion made clear, is that it can—and that for a younger generation of the Indian diaspora, caste is not a subject safely confined to family histories, Indian villages, or the pages of social reform literature.

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat*  Untouchability and caste discrimination remain deeply embedded in India’s social fabric—whether Rahul Gandhi speaks about them or not, and regardless of what the BJP –RSS establishment wants the world to believe about the “greatness” of Hindu or Indian culture. The Varna system continues to be the darkest stain on that cultural narrative, persisting even as Indians migrate abroad and become “green card holders.” Caste has travelled with them—to Europe, America, Canada, Africa, and across Asia.

By Vivek Sakpal*  On August 8, 2026, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, also the president of India's oldest political party (Indian National Congress), a Dalit (rarely mentioned) leader who has spent five decades in public life, addressed a rally at Ramlila Maidan in Haldwani, Uttarakhand. Two days later, members of the Shri Ram Sena reportedly performed a "shuddhikaran" havan at the very ground on which he had stood and spoken. 

By Raj Kumar Sinha*  There is no single reason for the decay of India's government education system. Behind it lies a combination of insufficient budget allocation, lack of basic infrastructure, and an absence of accountability. Teaching positions in schools lie vacant, and those who are employed often lack the training and competence required for modern times. The education system prioritizes rote learning and exam scores over skill development or practical knowledge. The new generation taking to the streets against the deterioration of government education is demanding not just facilities, but accountability.

By Ram Puniyani*  The multiple protests at Jantar Mantar have shaken our body politic to no end. While the Cockroach Janta Party precipitated the series of protests, the underlying resistance to government suppression has been deeply painful for society. Although the protests appeared to be centred on paper leaks, serious lapses in the social and political system provided the foundation for the protests to assume the form they did. The reported orders for pellet guns and firearms brought an element of total revulsion. The issue became so serious that the ruling government’s major leaders, the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, did not dare to attend Parliament’s session. Instead, they hid behind the make-believe façade of the Opposition supposedly preventing discussion in the House.

By Harasankar Adhikari*  Religion has long shaped human civilization, influencing ethics, social norms, and personal identity. Albert Einstein once observed that "science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind," capturing the enduring tension between faith and reason. In India, where spiritual traditions run deep, religion remains a powerful social force. Yet the question before us is not whether religion matters, but whether it has become an instrument of political division—and whether Indian democracy can navigate this challenge without compromising its foundational pluralism.

By Vijay Prashad  In Minaçu, in the northern part of the Brazilian state of Goiás, the landscape bears the scars of an earlier mineral rush. For decades, the town depended on the Cana Brava asbestos mine, whose prosperity was inseparable from lethal illnesses and a long history of environmental damage. Now Minaçu has been recruited into another promised future. At the Pela Ema mine, Serra Verde extracts rare-earth elements required for electric motors, wind turbines, advanced electronics, and weapons systems. The mineral has changed, but the danger is that the old structure of dependency will remain intact.

By Benyasiri Eimviriyapong   The arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) for a ‘leisure trip’ in Thailand before returning to its campaign of destruction against the people of West Asia demands immediate interrogation and opposition. For us Thai people, and those in sites of American plunder across the globe, this a rattling of the US’ cold war colonial chains on its most loyal lap dog, while conducting a war of aggression in Iran and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. In allowing the USS Lincoln to dock, the Thai ruling elites are once again facilitating a system of imperial violence that extends far beyond Southeast Asian borders, a system which in our case, is predicated on sexual violence and femicide.

By Md. Abu Saim*  The signing of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan on 7 August 2026 in Mecca marks a significant moment in contemporary geopolitics. Long anticipated across much of the Muslim world, the pact establishes that an armed attack on any one of the three signatories will be treated as an attack on all, while emphasizing that the arrangement is strictly defensive and directed only at external aggression.