Courtesy Kobad Ghandy
Kobad Ghandy is a communist and anti-caste activist who spent a decade in various jails, in Delhi and Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, as one of Indiaâs most high-profile political prisoners. When he was first arrested in 2009, he was accused of being a âsenior Maoist leader,â even as he now stands acquitted by the courts of those charges. Finally out of jail in late 2019, he began chronicling his life experiences, writing at length about what turned him to communism, his witnessing the inception of the Dalit Panthers and other peopleâs movements in Maharashtra with his late partner, Anuradha, and the physical conditions across Indian prisons. These culminated in the book Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir,
A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices U.U. Lallit, Indira Banerjee and K.M. Joseph will take up on Wednesday the anticipatory bail plea of civil rights activist Gautam Navalakha who is facing sedition and other charges in the Bhima Koregaon violence, which the NIA claimed was engineered by Maoist elements.
On February 14, the Bombay High Court had dismissed the bail plea of Navlakha and co-accused Anand Teltumbde in the Bhima Koregaon case, but had extended the interim protection granted to them in December last year by four weeks to enable them approach the Supreme Court.
The high court had rejected the anticipatory bail on the ground that the material placed before it indicated that there was prima facie evidence showing the complicity of both the accused in the case.
The era of thoughtcrime
Last Updated: Sat, Feb 27th, 2021, 10:23:07hrs
In what is arguably his most memorable and increasingly his most relevant novel worldwide, 1984, George Orwell coined the term “thoughtcrime” it was a reference to social and political ideologies that were not in keeping with that of the ruling regime. Even before social media was imagined, intellectual activity of any kind possession of certain books, love of particular music, a gathering of kindred souls, even voicing opinions could be criminalised, not only in Oceania but in the real world. We have seen it happen in the USSR before it was Russia, in Iran after 1979, in China since the 1960s, and now countries which claim to be democracies have found ways to criminalise thought.
Bhima Koregaon: Varavara Rao gets bail from Bombay HC on medical grounds for six months scroll.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scroll.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Why the Modi govt fears outspoken, dissenting young women
The arrests and attacks on dissenting women are attempts to scare all women into silence.
By Sreshta Ladegaam| Updated: 16th February 2021 8:01 pm IST Along with targeted hate campaigns on social media, many of these women have been subject to mental and physical abuse in prison.
The arrest of 21-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi over a toolkit on protests against farm laws shared by Greta Thunberg is drawing widespread criticism. Disha, one of the founders of Fridays For Future (FFF) India, was arrested by the Delhi Police in Bengaluru for ‘editing’ the toolkit and was remanded to five-day police custody by a Delhi court.