ADDED 02/04/2019
FROM 02/04/2019 | Just Security
BY Justin Sherman
Digital authoritarianism, defined broadly as wielding technology to enhance or enable authoritarian governance, is spreading around the world. While the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index found that, on a global level, “democracy stopped declining in 2018” for the first time in three years, the researchers cautioned that it may be merely a “pause.” In 2019, the […]
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ADDED 01/10/2019
FROM 01/04/2019 | The Hindu
BY Mohammed Ayoob
India is literally at the crossroads with the very future of its secular democracy at stake. With five important State Assembly elections in various stages of completion and the general election around the corner, the political temperature is at boiling point. Competitive Hindutva has become the name of the game, with the ostensibly secular Congress party trying […]
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ADDED 12/12/2018
FROM 12/11/2018 | The Aerogram
BY Sudip Bhattacharya
By the 1920s, fascism’s rise garnered a wide range of reactions from political and economic elites. Business leaders viewed Benito Mussolini’s fascism in Italy as necessary for “preserving” economic growth. Others, including some socialists, believed fascism would simply fade away. Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women’s Day, was a veteran German revolutionary socialist by the […]
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ADDED 10/09/2018
FROM 10/09/2018 | The Wire
BY Prabhat Patnaik
The real obstacle to understanding, or even recognising, contemporary fascism is alas, the memory of the 1930s. The fact that we have fascists in power in India, at the helm of a liberal bourgeois state, is indubitable: their organisation, the RSS, to which they belong and swear by, has made no secret of its admiration […]
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ADDED 10/04/2018
FROM 10/04/2018 | Feminism in India
BY FII
“লড়াই, লড়াই, লড়াই চাই/ লড়াই করে বাঁচতে চাই” Let us fight for our rights and live our life. You do not get to hear such slogans on the streets of my city very often. You do not get to see the entire city street getting decked up to celebrate something which millions have longed for years. You do not get to […]
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ADDED 08/30/2018
FROM 08/30/2018 | The Wire
BY Alf Gunvald Nilsen
On Tuesday morning, both insult and injury were inflicted on the Indian democracy when in a nationwide sweep, the Pune Police raided the homes of several human rights activists and arrested five of them – Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Vernon Gonsalves. The arrests, which were justified with reference to the violence that […]
see sourceADDED 08/10/2018
FROM 02/22/2018 | TruthDig
BY Chris Hedges
In a recent episode of “On Contact,” host Chris Hedges and activist Shehla Rashid Shora discuss Hindutva fascism in India and draw parallels to the current situation in the United States. “Caste slavery is fascism,” says Rashid Shora, the face of the student movement in India, in conversation with the Truthdig columnist. “It is not […]
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ADDED 07/21/2018
FROM 07/21/2018 | Boing Boing
BY CORY DOCTOROW
A new report from the Institute For the Future on “state-sponsored trolling” documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats. The report traces the origin of the phenomenon to a series […]
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ADDED 06/02/2018
FROM 06/02/2018 | Hindustan Times
BY Prasun Sonwalkar
Much has changed since the 1976 murder of teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar and the 1979 riots in Southall that form the backdrop of acclaimed writer Hanif Kureishi’s political play Borderline, but its continuing relevance in the age of Brexit was highlighted in London on Thursday. A two-hour engaging reading of the 1981 play at the […]
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ADDED 05/04/2018
FROM 03/05/2018 | Punjab Today
BY Kamjaat Singh
AT A TIME when Punjab is in the throes of a massive social upheaval and there is a complete disconnect between its farmers, farm labourers and those dependent on rural economy and others in towns and cities who are more cued into structures of political power, one would have thought that vast swathes of political […]
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