Opinions

A few weeks back an incident disappeared from the news space as mysteriously and suddenly as it had appeared. The affair in question was that of a Jarawa woman being made to dance naked for the amusement of tourists in the Andamans. A video clip appeared on the website of a British newspaper and set the word “Jarawa” trending on Twitter for a couple of days. And then the concern, outrage and all traces of the news vanished into thin air. In a 24/7 era of news bombardment, that’s bound to happen...

One forms a perspective based on two things: what one gets to see, and one’s own sense of reasonability, sensibility and logic. Quite often, in the case of many, it is the lack of both. The ideas and opinions I hold of Kashmir today are based on what I have seen, mostly from afar, and the sense that I have tried to make of it. Most of these have been from the point of view of a journalist of the old school which believes that journalism is about people. When I started out as a journalist a...

So, one of India’s most wanted men, Mallojula Koteswara Rao a.k.a. Kishenji, has been eliminated from the Maoist theatre. There are many who are heaving a sigh of relief, there are others who argue that this is the beginning of the end of the Maoists. But arguments steeped in speculation are essentially bad arguments. They leave out the context, and are therefore myopic. Kishenji’s death in an encounter on November 24 came even as parleys were on between the Maoists and the Trinamool Congress...

The word ‘democracy’ is one of the most abused in today’s world. A watch on the news front will provide you with glaring instances. Let us keep away from the villains we love to hate – politicians, bureaucrats and corporates, and look at the mess we are in from a peoples’ point of view. After all, democracy, we are told time and again, is about people. A democracy is built on several foundation stones – that of freedom and the right to dissent being the most critical. If you don’t have freedom...

The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian novelist Mid-November brought some distressing news – more than four persons per day were killed in police and judicial custody in India between 2001 and 2010. The exact number would be 14,231. The New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its report, Torture in India 2011, revealed that a large majority of these deaths were a direct consequence of torture in...

There is something perverse in the fact that the politics of poverty always brings out the poverty in the politics of the day. So when the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, told the Supreme Court about the commission’s desire to fix Rs 32 a day as the poverty line in urban India, the ensuing debate metamorphosed into all about politics. Number-crunching, when about an emotive issue such as poverty, is less of an exercise in economics, and more of political one...

Reports of Maoists mobilising people against dams in Arunachal Pradesh, shortly after Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi had warned about ultra-Left presence in Assam, can only mean that policymakers both in New Delhi and the North-East can no longer ignore the presence of the Reds in the region. The situation in the state is increasingly worrying, especially now that captured Maoist members have reportedly confessed links to elements in the North-East. Gogoi’s claims were not backed by reports...

It is not always that the “people” of this country get to hear good news. And let’s, for once, exclude the privileged like us (who are fortunate to have been born in cities and read these glossies) when we talk of people. Let’s shift our gaze to the heartland, where the “real” India probably lives. It is an India that is rich and poor at the same time. Take a set of maps – that of the country’s forests, minerals, rivers, poor, and tribals together, and superimpose them. You will be taken by...

When Mamata Banerjee swept away the Left Front and became Chief Minister of West Bengal earlier this year, expectations had preceded her. She had many tasks at hand, one of them being bringing Maoists to the negotiating table. Some 100 days into her tenure, she has scored a few points, including a tripartite agreement with the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). But restoring peace in the Darjeeling hills is not the same as doing it in Jangalmahal forests. The more days pass by, it becomes obvious...

A disaster, unfortunately, is an opportune time to visit certain issues. Sunday’s earthquake gives us reasons to look at the issue of dam safety in India. True, the quake didn’t have an adverse affect on any of Sikkim’s dams. But then, that was probably sheer luck. A quake-hit dam can be a catastrophe of untold proportions – which I’m sure no one needs to be told. Reports from Sikkim have been slow in trickling out, but there has been one report of one National Hydroelectric Power Corporation...