Annup Sonii, Bezwada Wilson, Amitabh Bacchan By Rajiv Shah  Yesterday, Bezwada Wilson, a well-known Dalit rights activist who has for long been campaigning for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers, was on superstar Amitabh Bacchan’s “popular” Kaun Banega Crorepati show on Sony TV. I was a little surprised, but thought it was indeed a good opportunity for him to put across the plight of the most disadvantaged section of Dalits, Valmikis, before an audience which largely happens to be from dominant castes.  I decided to watch the show and listen to what all Wilson had to say. I also thought it was good of Bacchan to give Wilson, who heads the Safai Karmachari Andolan and is a Magsaysay awardee, an opportunity to tell Crorepati audience on issues that bog this most oppressed community. The level of ignorance that exists on the law banning manual scavenging in any form was revealed, during the show, by none other than the man who accompanied Wilson, top TV actor Annup Sonii. After Wilso

A blogging site carries an interesting article, "4 African Kings Who Ruled India That Have Been Erased From History". Two Ghana bloggers ( Koby PI and MR Eris ), apparently, are owners of the site, which calls itself “Mind Builders Fellowship", which, it says, is an organization that helps each and everyone to liberate oneself by "renewing of the mind and flashing out the unwanted elements out of the mind.” Interestingly, the bloggers are from a country which shot into prominence for India last year after several scholars from the country called Gandhiji “racist”, leading to removal of the his statue from the University of Ghana. Now, Ghana bloggers seek to suggest how India has “ignored” African kings. Reproduced below is the blog: ***  “…The darkest man is here the most highly esteemed and considered better than the others who are not so dark. Let me add that in very truth these people portray and depict their gods and their idols black and their devils white as s

Counterview Desk  A blogging site carries an interesting article, "4 African Kings Who Ruled India That Have Been Erased From History". Two Ghana bloggers ( Koby PI and MR Eris ), apparently, are owners of the site, which calls itself “Mind Builders Fellowship", which, it says, is an organization that helps each and everyone to liberate oneself by "renewing of the mind and flashing out the unwanted elements out of the mind.” Interestingly, the bloggers are from a country which shot into prominence for India last year after several scholars from the country called Gandhiji “racist”, leading to removal of the his statue from the University of Ghana. Now, Ghana bloggers seek to suggest how India has “ignored” African kings. Reproduced below is the blog: ***  “…The darkest man is here the most highly esteemed and considered better than the others who are not so dark. Let me add that in very truth these people portray and depict their gods and their idols black and their

Chief minister Vijay Rupani in Abdasa  By Our Representative The Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), a well-known elite NGO monitoring political processes, especially elections, in India, has said that despite a Supreme Court order, political parties, including BJP and Congress, fighting eight by-elections in Gujarat, scheduled for November 3, have chosen candidates with criminal cases.

By Fr Cedric Prakash SJ*  It is more than three weeks now: On the night of October 8, 2020, the 83-year-old Jesuit Fr Stan Swamy was taken into custody by the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) from his residence in Ranchi to an undisclosed destination. According to his colleagues, the NIA did not serve a warrant on Fr. Stan and that their behaviour was absolutely arrogant and rude.

By Our Representative A rapid telephonic survey of the Human Rights Commissions, Women’s Commissions, Child Rights Commissions, Minorities Commissions and Lokayuktas at state as well as Central level has suggested that a large number of them have not functioned during the Covid-19 pandemic, even though it is their job to “intervene and uphold the fundamental rights of the stranded workers and provide them with basic amenities.” Carried out by Rini Kothari, a final year law student at the Jindal Global Law School (Sonipat) during her internship at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), under the guidance of Venkatesh Nayak, an eminent social activist in order to update the Lockdown Performance Database, a CHRI document, the survey found that 69% of Human Rights Commissions were functioning, and as for the remaining 31%, no records existed. Pointing out that this was particularly “appalling” as it was the time when overnight tens of thousands of daily-wage migrant workers turne

Atrocities on Dalits and Adivasis: Sept 25 to Oct 25, 2020  Counterview Desk The India Civil Watch International, a multinational organization claiming to be committed to uphold democratic rights in India, even as condemning the horrific case of the rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh (UP) by four dominant caste men, has said that the “brutality” exposes “the Indian police” in the aftermath of the incident.

By Rajiv Shah  Keshubhai Patel, former chief minister of Gujarat, has passed away at the ripe old age of 92. Known to be an opponent (I would call him bete noire in my stories for the Times of India) of Narendra Modi, I am reproducing below a blog on him, “Simply Keshubhai”, I wrote way on June 30, 2012 for the TOI blogging site around the time he was about to dissociate his decades old association with BJP and form Gujarat Parivartan Party, which didn’t last after the December 2012 Gujarat state assembly polls.  Always critical of Modi, going so far as to call political atmosphere of Gujarat under him “mini-emergency”, Keshubhai withdrew from active politics thereafter, “accepting” Modi’s leadership. His activity ever since was confined to remaining chairman of the Somnath Temple Trust. I am tempted to reproduce the blog in lieu of a tribute to the grand old man. Read on: ***  He was addressed as “dinosaur” by late Congress chief minister Amarsinh Chaudhury, but Gujarat government of

Shabnam Hashmi By Our Representative To mark one month of the “alleged gang rape and brutalization by upper caste men” of a young Dalit woman from Hathras, a Delhi-based human rights organization Anhad (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy) led by senior activist Shabnam Hashmi, has held a nationwide campaign, #IfWeDoNotRise, on October 29 to give “voice to the cumulative outrage of citizens” against such incidents across India.

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* A young aspiring Nikita Tomar was murdered by Tauseef, who happened to be stalking her since here college days, as both studied in the same institution in Faridabad, a North Indian town. Nikita, it is reported, had turned down Tauseef’s proposal in the past. The young man could not take the rejection and killed her.

By Our Representative Even as Adani Australia, subsidiary of India’s powerful industrial group, Adanis, welcomed the Minerals Council of Australia’s economic report from the Commodity Insights, which projects that thermal coal imports to the Asia Pacific region rising by 275 million tonnes through to 2030, climate protesters stepped up #StopAdani campaign, including online, in different parts of the world against insurance companies insuring the Adani coal project in Australia.

By Rajiv Shah A US think-tank study has said that even though Prime Minister Narendra Modi still enjoys considerable support among Indian diaspora in the country – 48% of Indian Americans approve of Modi’s performance, 32 percent disapprove, while 20% have “no opinion” – the man often dubbed as American Modi, Donald Trump, is unlikely to get more than 22% of their votes in the November 3 US polls, with his rival, Joseph Biden, likely to get 72% of the votes.

By Our Representative In a major revelation, top Dalit rights leader Martin Macwan has said that between 75 and 80 per cent girls, who come to study at the Dalit Shakti Kendra (DSK), founded by Macwan about two decades ago off Ahmedabad to offer alternative training options to manual scavenging and other caste based occupations, have experienced sexual violence or harassment.

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* India is facing its worst crisis in its recent history. The Hindutva forces shaped by RSS and politically led by BJP are accelerating the crisis to undo liberal constitutional democracy in India. The political opposition is withering everyday with the help of media, puppet police, investigative agencies and judiciary.

By Rajiv Shah  A top Gujarat government insider phoned me up the other day, reminding me of a story we carried in Counterview early this year regarding how a Gujarat government public sector undertaking (PSU), Gujarat State Fertilisers and Chemicals (GSFC), “transferred” Rs 250 crore to a Canadian firm Karnalyte for a potash mining project in Canada, but the project never took off, hence whole money has “gone waste.”  Written by by AK Luke, a retired IAS bureaucrat and a former MD of GSFC, referring to my article, this insider phoned me up to inform me that the Counterview story was copy-pasted in a little-known site called Kractivism. On looking up, I found, indeed, Luke’s story had been copy-pasted, but the site, run by a rights activist, did not have the courtesy to acknowledge the original source. Be that as it may, the state insider wondered why such a big news, involving Rs 250 crore “scam” had skipped top newspapers in Gujarat, forget about India. He said, normally, when such

The recent unfortunate, highly deplorable, brutal and heinous incident of rape, body mutilation, murder and burning of a young Dalit girl in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh reveals the sickening neglect of the political community as well as of the society to reinforce caste, gender and power dynamics in the country. In light of this, the Gender Impact Studies Center (GISC) at Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), Counterview, GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation, City Makers Mission International and Delhi Post News organized a Special Talk with Mr Martin Macwan, an eminent Dalit Rights Activist as part of its #WebPolicyTalk – The State of Gender Equality: #GenderGaps on October 21, 2020, titled “The Heinousness of many Hathras amid the Pandemic – Voluntarism, the Way Ahead for Combating Caste and Gender-based Violence”. An IMPRI note: *** Mr Macwan raised pertinent points that the victim of sexual violence was deprived of her right to be respectfully cremated. Her body was instead

Pramod Ranjan*  makes prediction of what people would think post-pandemic phase: *** It is said that had the spread of the Novel Coronavirus not been contained by imposing lockdowns, by now, it would have consumed a substantial chunk of the human residents of the earth. But is the truth as one-sided as is being claimed? Lockdown killed lakhs of persons the world over and its after-effects have ruined the economies of scores of low- and middle-income countries like India. Crores of persons have been condemned to a life of poverty and misery. What is going to change Offices and educational institutions were a gift of the modern age. By bringing human minds together, the places of work and the centres of education not only scripted a new chapter in the development of the human race but also brought diverse communities on common platforms. It is almost certain that in the post-Covid world, schools and offices would not exist as we know them today. A new law for bringing about changes in

By Pankti Jog* If a reply received under the Right to Information (RTI) Act is to be believed, a whopping 3.96 lakh ration cards have been deleted from the National Food Security Act (NFSA) benefit in Gujarat. This comes to over 15 lakh people, all of them belonging to tribal and backwards areas. They have been thrown out of the subsided ration cover despite the current Covid situation.

By Anand K Sahay* Media and facile opinion polls appear to have overlooked two somewhat related perspectives with regard to the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections when the first votes will be cast on coming Wednesday. They have partly relied on the 2015 polling data on caste arithmetic as if this was the sacred “gayatri mantra” itself, besides strongly hinting that the presumed Modi magic could safely take the ruling alliance home.

Counterview Desk As many as 134 citizens, mainly from Gujarat, condemning the closure of “Kashmir Times” office in Srinagar, have said that entire effort is to silence freedom of expression in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and teach its editor Anuradha Bhasin a lesson for opposing “repressive measures” of the Government of India following the abrogation of Article 370.

In August 2020, Global March Against Child Labour released an evidence-based report , providing an overview of the situation of child labour with a gender lens in sugarcane harvesting in India. The report highlights that children are pushed into hazardous child labour due to structural poverty among harvesters, most of whom are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, also referred to as DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi/Tribal) in this article, because of exploitative hiring practices resulting in debt bondage. It was found that traditional gender-based norms contributed significantly to child labour by normalising unequal wages and unpaid family work. This article by Gazal Malik and Kratika Choubey* is an extension to the report, focusing on the facets of gender and caste as cross-cutting issues to be kept in mind while addressing the problem of child labour in sugarcane supply chain and in other agricultural crops in India: *** Caste, Poverty and Child Marriage