Counterview

By Rajeev Khanna* Amid the COVID19 outbreak in India, it is the exceptionally large community of high blood pressure or hypertension patients that stands out among the most vulnerable. Medical experts say that the number of hypertension patients in the country is more than 30 per cent of the total population.

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* The world is heading towards worst economic recession in its history. The governments are worried about their citizenry and future of their country. But Narendra Modi cares little as long as his popularity and electoral victory remains intact. Modi fiddles with the future of India and Indians by manipulating the public mind with the help of mass media.

By  A  Representative The civil rights organization, Right to Food Campaign, Jharkhand, in a letter to chief minister Hemant Soren has warned the state would see the danger of hunger and starvation in the absence of “any effective provision for the delivery of food rations to households without ration card.”

By Praveen Srivastava, Anand Mathew, Joseph Nitilal, Sandeep Pandey* With lockdown extended and little relaxation in some essential services, the plights of poor are not going to reduce for sure. Lakhs of migrant labourers are struck in metro cities, far away from their homes.

By  A  Representative India has dropped to rank 142, two points below its 2019 rank, in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index.The annual press freedom list is produced by the campaign group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which surveys the state of the media in 180 countries and territories. RSF’s latest report attributes India’s rank to the Narendra Modi government “tightening” its grip on the media, and pressuring it to “toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line”. Among other issues, it has listed coordinated social media hate campaigns against journalists reporting on issues that “annoy Hindutva followers”, criminal prosecutions to gag journalists critical of authorities and police violence against journalists. The report also suggests that India’s rank is heavily affected by the situation in Kashmir, where it has become “virtually impossible” for journalists to do their job.

By  A  Representative  The Gujarat High Court has said it “expects and trusts” that the state would be “vigilant and do its best” to ensure the safety of nearly sugarcane 90,000 workers from Maharashtra, working as sugarcane workers in four South Gujarat districts -- Bharuch, Surat, Valsad and Navsari – as also several lakh inter-state migrants from Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal -- but stranded in South Gujarat following the lockdown announced on March 24 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

By Rit Nanda* “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff, Barack Obama, Former President of the USA It seems odd to start an article with perhaps one of the most cynical political quotes of recent times, but it is imperative that we see the truth in the latter part of the quote that a crisis is an opportunity to do things anew. And crises do not come bigger than the COVID-19 pandemic currently ravaging the globe.

By Dr Mansee Bal Bhargava* It was my PhD Defence day on Feb 20, 2015 at Erasmus University Rotterdam when my Thesis Supervisor, Prof. Jan Jaap Bouma, gifted a book titled, ‘Speeches that Changed the World’ written by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Quercus Publication), with a typical Dutch humor saying that my thesis arguments all through were positive and passionate and that I must use the assertive public speaking skill in future.

By Moin Qazi*  Warora is a small township in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. It is best known for the small village republic the great humanist Baba Amte set up for disabled people discarded by mainstream society. One of the closest villages to the town is Wanoja, a hamlet of three hundred families. Twenty five years back, it was a bootlegger's paradise, as unruly men and youth would swamp the village square and shops, heavily inebriated and spouting filthy vocabulary.

Counterview Desk  In a major media controversy, top daily, the Hindustan Times, refused to carry well-known historian and Gandhi biographer Ramachandra Guha’s fortnightly column ‘Past and Present’ in its original form this Sunday, asking him to make major changes before publishing it. Guha, who had written on “the folly and vanity” of the Central government’s Central Vista project in Delhi, immediately tweeted that the “newspaper has censored the column.”