The award-winning author addressed a gathering at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Sunday   Beloved friends, comrades and my fellow writers, This place where we are gathered today is only a short bus ride away from where four days ago a fascist mob, fired up by speeches made by members of the Ruling Party, backed up and actively assisted by …

Hong Kong, Lebanon, Sudan, Brazil and Colombia are witnessing similar movements.   by Alka Kurian Women are among the strongest opponents of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens, which threaten the citizenship rights of vulnerable groups like Muslims, poor women, oppressed castes and LGBTQ people. The Act, passed in December 2019, fast-tracks Indian citizenship for undocumented refugees from …

Abhrajyoti Chakraborty on a giant of the Bengali renaissance   When Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941, crowds gathered outside his ancestral mansion in Calcutta hoping to catch a last glimpse. As soon as the body was brought out of the house, everyone charged toward it at once. Hairs were plucked from his beard, wreaths tossed from buildings on the funeral …

The world is facing a growing disillusionment with current economic and political order that was historically erected through great games and neoliberal economic agenda and development concepts by the colonial empires. These issues were deliberated upon by scholars, academics, development practitioners at a workshop held recently in Ottawa University, Canada. They debunked the neoliberal development concept and advocated pluralistic, universal …

IHC wraps up cases against AWP PTM activists, asks government to protect the right to freedom of expression    High Asia Herald Report   Islamabad: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Monday disposed of a petition of 23 workers who were arrested by the police last month for protesting against the arrest of PTM chief Manzoor Pashteen when the court …

The key water-related issues faced by Pakistan are that of mismanagement and population growth more than water scarcity itself, argues Amir Hussain in his latest column published in The News. He suggests a strong network of researchers, policymakers, and communities in the Indus Basin region to mitigate the risks posed by climate change to the ecosystem.     by Amir Hussain …

Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, and her party supporters attend a protest march against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and a new citizenship law, in Kolkata, India, December 16, 2019. Reuters/Rupak De Chowdhuri Fiction in time of fake news. Below is the text of the 2020 Clark Lecture in English Literature instituted by Trinity College, Cambridge. We …

In this last installment of the three-part article based on correspondence between Hassan Mirza and Professor Noam Chomsky, the internationally-acclaimed linguist and social scientist speaks about the British colonial genocidal role in South Asia and Africa, the future of South Asia, religion, the catastrophic impact of climate change, and the US-Europe imperialist-induced migration crisis.   Religion and spirituality Hassan Mirza …

By Raza Naeem Raziya Sajjad Zaheer (1917-1979), who passed away in Delhi 40 years ago today, was one of Urdu’s most accomplished but least celebrated and acknowledged women writers. She was a novelist, short-story writer and translator, and a Communist activist and Progressive writer born in Ajmer in 1917. She won the Nehru Award in 1966. She had been contributing short …

A petition signed by over 10,000 students & academics from renowned universities across the world also speaks up against ‘illegal siege and curfew’ in AMU over CAA protests, reports Simrin Sirur in ThePrint, an Indian online magazine