A compilation of news, commentary, statements by Human rights fora and response by secular platforms in Bangaldesh to the violent attack on Buddhist shrines.
A compilation of news, commentary, statements by Human rights fora and response by secular platforms in Bangaldesh to the violent attack on Buddhist shrines.
In the well-established tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn reflected on Russia’s past, her relation with the West, and the crisis of modern civilization; but he departed from that tradition in significant ways.
The Gujarat pogrom illustrates why we cling so fiercely to the idea of the democratic public – namely because it provides us with a comfortable dichotomy between good and evil, freedom and power, public and authority. At the same time, an event such as the Gujarat pogrom forces us – scholars, journalists, members of different publics - to ask how far we, against growing empirical evidence, also cling to the idea of conventional anti-democratic measures, such as censorship, and totalitarian logics in “other countries†, in terms of ruthless dictators who suppress their people, for the sake of keeping up the democratic public in our imagination (and at the risk of becoming inadvertently complicit in its absence). We like to assume that as soon as there is no censorship and no identifiable dictator, public(-ness) equals democracy (which explains why the Gujarat pogrom is hardly known outside India and has done so little to tarnish India’s popular image as the world’s largest democracy). The public, however, is also a determining agent in post- or non-dictatorial anti-democracy, not only in “other†(read non-western) countries but on a global level, and very much in the west itself.
Recent judgments of many courts in cases related to terrorism which have exonerated the innocent individuals who were arrested and then incarcerated and tortured for long periods, in the process destroying their lives and those of their families, have also censured members of the police force and have recommended departmental action against them. Here too, no action other than the white-wash kind was taken. Do our country’s police forces function in circumstances of impunity? Are there means and mechanisms by which it can be ensured that the “upholders of the law†do not themselves go against the law in their actions? Or are the law-men to be always a law unto themselves?
If the FUTA strike is crushed it will resemble the crushing blow that JR inflicted on the working class and independent political activity in July 1980. I do not want to over dramatise, it is only in retrospect that we can make secure historical judgements, but it is possible that this is one of the final chances the nation will get to throw back the executive power of an authoritarian menace. The state is primed for the offensive, but public opinion, the working class and trade unions, and the educated classes and left opinion are half asleep, but fortunately, also half awake.
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