'Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a complete lockdown of the country for a period of twenty-one days. All work, except that of essential service providers, is to be stopped. Daily wage workers nationwide are suffering under the lockdown because of the nature of their work. Hunger and poverty are looming over their heads. The prime minister’s Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, is no exception. On Wednesday, a group of children were seen sitting cross-legged and eating grass, called “akri” in the local language.
'Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi see the pictures of the long lines of men, with bags and bundles, making their way along the edges of national highways out of New Delhi? Did he hear the young man, sobbing because there was no way home, and no way to escape police batons who asked, “How will we go, we can’t go by flight, can we?” If Modi did, there was no sign that he considered their circumstance to be of any consequence.
'In his new book, Sebastian & Sons, TM Krishna tells of Parlandu, the “greatest mrdangam maker ever”. Parlandu was Dalit, as all makers of the mrdangam, a percussion instrument made with cow hide which is integral to Carnatic music, are. He was employed by Vaidyanatha Ayyar and, later, by his legendary pupil, the revered Carnatic musician Palghat Mani Iyer. Both teacher and disciple, as almost all mrdangam players, were Brahmin.
'Those in quarantine in government facilities will soon get some reading material to keep them company. One of these will be a collection of speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “We regularly distribute the copies of these speeches to various dignitaries, as well as to schools and colleges on various occasions,” said a source aware of the development. The source said these could also be distributed at all the quarantine centres across the country...'
'The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish. If the plans of Modi’s bureaucrats and advisors are realised, this system will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home.
'Joe Biden's presidential campaign has appointed a former aide to Hillary Clinton as senior advisor on Muslim American engagement following revelations that his predecessor has close ties to India's right-wing Hindu government. The appointment of Farooq Mitha, a longtime Biden supporter and former Muslim advisor to the Clinton campaign in 2016, comes after weeks of pressure to remove Amit Jani as coordinator given his strong ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party...'
'Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman confirmed on Friday that the troubled Yes Bank had had loan exposure to “very stressed” companies associated with Anil Ambani and Subhash Chandra, two industrialists considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A stack of bad loans had reduced to almost zero the net worth of Yes Bank, whose board was superseded by the RBI on Thursday night...'
'What should also concern us is that the message of the Beti Bachao campaign itself is steeped in the same patriarchy that it claims to be fighting. And patriarchy is one area where ‘using fire to fight fire’ does not work. In June 2018, the Indian social media saw a photograph of a mural against sex selection on a wall in Haryana. The image showed a little girl, with her head covered, rolling out rotis, with the slogan ‘Kaise khaoge unke haath ki rotiya, jab paida hone nahi doge betiyan?’ (Who will make rotis for you if you won’t let daughters be born?).
'A mob of nearly 40 men from right-wing outfits gathered outside a college lecturer’s house in Silchar, Assam, who was arrested for posting derogatory remarks about the prime minister, and asked his family “what kind of Hindus” they were after they found no photos of gods, The Wire reported on Saturday. The incident occurred on Friday, shortly after police acted on the complaint to arrest Souradeep Sengupta, a guest lecturer at Gurucharan College, from his residence. Sengupta had written about the violence in Delhi and the role of the Hindutva forces in it on his Facebook page...'
'A teacher at Silchar’s Gurcharan College was arrested on Friday night for posting “objectionable material on Facebook”, confirmed the police in Cachar. Earlier in the day, the students of Gurcharan College, Silchar, registered an FIR against their teacher Souradeep Sengupta for “making derogatory remarks and abusing the Sanatan Dharma”. “He also tried to incite communal violence by making inflammatory comments against the Hindu community,” stated the complaint filed by 10 students of GC college...'
