outlookindia.com 2021-04-03T15:12:40+05:30
Two years back, if you had asked a voter in Pala about ‘love jehad’, you would have been greeted with a blank expression. It was not very much part of the political vocabulary in this neck of the woods. Pala is canonical Kottayam, a small town in this south-central district, with a slow, lilting dialect and an honest, hard-working ethic you could also say it’s at the heart of Syrian Christian Kerala. It’s not as if communities in Kerala had only unbounded love for each other. Like elsewhere, there can be less than complimentary views on each other, mutual suspicions and tinges of animosity. But politics here had only articulated communitarian loyalties; it never much based itself around actual antipathies. There’s a general balance of social forces here that gives Kerala its stability and even refinement also a large social commons, so to speak, in which everyone participates. Therefore, the pathological fear of each ot
Photograph by PTI outlookindia.com 2021-04-03T15:10:15+05:30
When votes swing in Bengal, they swing big. The CPI(M)’s tally oscillated from 14 in the rigging-marred 1972 assembly elections to 178 in 1977, and from 176 in 2006 to 40 in 2011. The TMC, which bagged 30 assembly seats in 2006, won 184 in 2011; it bagged one Lok Sabha seat in 2004, 19 in 2009 and 34 in 2014. The BJP, whose tally rose from two in the 2014 Lok Sabha election to 18 in 2019, saw its voteshare at Kaliaganj dip from 52.15 per cent in the Lok Sabha election in May 2019 to 43.54 per cent in the assembly bypolls in November. Similarly, in Kharagpur, its voteshare fell from 57.23 per cent to 34.01 per cent. TMC won the two seats for the first time in Kaliaganj, its voteshare went up from 27.25 per cent in the Lok Sabha polls to 44.65 per cent in the assembly bypolls, and from 29.58 per cent to 47.65 per cent in Kharagpur. This situation has left BJP and TMC leaders clueless about the p
Our battle for love must be militantly waged – and beautifully won: Arundhati Roy
The text of Arundhati Roy’s speech at the Elgar Parishad 2021, Pune on January 30.
By News Desk| Published: 31st January 2021 11:05 am IST Courtesy Muslim Mirror
By Arundhati Roy
I thank the organisers of the 2021 Elgar Parishad for inviting me to speak at this forum to mark what would have been Rohit Vemula’s 32nd birthday and the 1818 victory of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. Not far from here, Mahar troops fighting in the British Army defeated the Peshwa King Bajirao II under whom Mahars and other Dalit castes were cruelly persecuted and ritually debased in indescribable ways.
Dibyangshu Sarkar/ AFP
I thank the organisers of the 2021 Elgar Parishad for inviting me to speak at this forum to mark what would have been Rohit Vemula’s 32nd birthday and the 1818 victory of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. Not far from here, Mahar troops fighting in the British Army defeated the Peshwa King Bajirao II under whom Mahars and other Dalit castes were cruelly persecuted and ritually debased in indescribable ways.
From this platform let me join the other speakers to express my solidarity with the farmers protest that is calling for the immediate withdrawal of the three Farm Bills that have been rammed down the throats of millions of farmers and farm workers and brought them onto the streets. We are here to express our sorrow and anger for the many who have died during the course of the protest. The situation on Delhi’s borders where the farmers have been peacefully camping for two months is becoming tense and dangerous. Every possible trick and provocation is be