'An FIR was registered against a former Delhi University professor Ashok Vohra, on Tuesday night, for allegedly hurting religious sentiments of Hindus during his speech at the Mohan Lal Sukhadia (MLS) University in Udaipur. On Tuesday evening several right-wing groups blocked the highway at Udaipur to pressurise the police into filing an FIR against the professor.
'Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History is back, and how. Without any cuts, barely 20 months after it was withdrawn - not banned - from the market by its original publishers Penguin India.
'Renowned historian Ramchandra Guha on Saturday said he believes that the government at the Centre led by Narendra Modi is the most "anti-intellectual" the country ever had and is manifested in the appointments it had made in various educational and cultural institutions.
Over the years, every so-called spontaneous attack on free expression has had the support of political groups... Violence is the weapon of choice of all self-styled defenders of faiths and ideas in India. This week’s example comes from Maharashtra, where offices of the Marathi newspaper Lokmat in Akola and Jalgaon were vandalised. The attackers, it seems, were upset by an illustration for an article in the newspaper’s Sunday edition about how the ISIS is funded.
'On Saturday, senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram admitted that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was unjust. “I have no hesitation in saying that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book was wrong,” he said. The proscription was imposed 27 years back, in 1988, when Chidambaram was the Minister of State Home Affairs in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet. The novel had outraged conservative Muslim opinion when it was published.
'A family was evicted by fellow patrons at a cinema hall here on November 29 for allegedly not standing up when the national anthem was played. As per a State government order passed in 2003, cinema halls in Maharashtra are required to play the national anthem before the start of each movie. The incident came to light when a moviegoer in the same theatre (PVR Cinemas in the suburb of Kurla in central Mumbai) filmed the altercation and posted it on Twitter and Facebook, leading to an online uproar...
'A leading Marathi newspaper group, Lokmat's office was attacked in multiple places in Maharashtra. The copies of the Sunday edition of the newspaper were also burnt at several places because of a blasphemous cartoon which was published in Lokmat's supplement Manthan. The article titled 'ISIS cha Paisa' (ISIS' money) and its accompanying image irked the members of the Muslim community and hundreds of Muslims in Dhule, Nandurbar, Malegaon and other parts of Maharashtra staged various protests...'
“Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He has no faith in rebirth. As an ordinary teacher, he will live as P Murugan. Leave him alone.” With this post on Facebook almost year ago, in January 2015, Murugan bowed out of the literary world that had been his passion. Hounded, abused and threatened by right wing groups in Chennai this writer decided to stop writing and announced his “death.”
'The debate on intolerance in the country has now hit the Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) as well. Kannada writer TK Dayanand and poet Arif Raja have boycotted the Bangalore Lit festival that is being held in the city on December 5 and 6. One of the Directors of the BLF, author Vikram Sampath, had recently written an article where he stated that he was against writers returning their awards. This statement hasn’t gone down well with many writers who have now taken a stand against the BLF.
'The BJP on Wednesday sharpened its attack on Aamir Khan for his remarks on intolerance, with senior spokesmen and ministers accusing the actor of “blaming the whole nation” and committing a “moral offence”. It said an icon like him should not use words that blamed the country, and hit out at some political forces for creating obstacles in the nation’s development process...'
