'Following severe criticism for arresting two law students under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Kerala government has announced that it will set up a high court judge-appointed committee to look into the charges. According to a report in Asianet, the state has agreed to provide permission for prosecution only after the committee submits its report. The two men — Allan Shuhaib and Thaha Fasal — are both CPI(M) workers in Kozhikode, according to a report in New Indian Express. The duo was picked up by police at Pantheerankavu on the night of November 1.
'Twitter has been accused of bowing to Indian censorship and suppressing freedom of speech in Kashmir, after nearly one million tweets were removed. Almost 100 accounts were also made inaccessible to locals in the last two years, spurring claims that Twitter is contradicting the very values it purports to uphold. The findings were revealed in a study by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Friday, showing that Twitter agreed to block more accounts in the region than in every other country combined...'
'On August 10, 2018, the Indian government informed Twitter that an account belonging to Kashmir Narrator, a magazine based in Jammu and Kashmir, was breaking Indian law. The magazine had recently published a cover story on a Kashmiri militant who fought against Indian rule. By the end of the month, Indian police had arrested the journalist who wrote it, Aasif Sultan, and Twitter had withheld the magazine’s account in India, blocking local access to more than 5,000 tweets. As of October 2019, Sultan was still in prison, facing terrorism-related charges that CPJ has repeatedly condemned.
'In a move that openly violates the constitutional protection of free speech in India, political detainees in Kashmir, including top leaders, are being forced to sign a bond that will bar them from speaking or commenting on the “recent events” in the state as a condition of their release.
'It seems like the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), believes in doing away with cultural diversity and crushing cultural dissent. This can be seen in the recent move by a BJP MP from Mysuru, Pratap Simha, preventing an event called ‘Mahisha Dasara’, which was scheduled to be held on September 27. Mahisha Dasara is an event organised by various dalit organisations, progressive organisations from Karnataka as a counter to the Dasara celebration in the Mysuru palace and elsewhere in the state.
'Four Kashmiri students at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) have been served show-cause notices by the authorities for holding a protest at the campus, said the official sources on Friday. The action comes a day after a group of Kashmiri students had taken out a march from the AMU library to the Bab-e-Syed gate and raised slogans against the alleged atrocities by the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir during the past one month...'
'Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement leader Shehla Rashid has been booked for sedition over her tweets in which she alleged that the Armed Forces tortured civilians and ransacked houses in the Valley after Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was revoked, police said on Friday. Rashid has called the charge “frivolous, politically motivated and a pathetic attempt to silence” her.
'Three theatrical performances, all based on caste discrimination in the country, ran into trouble last month when the Maharashtra police landed at the venue and allegedly tried to disrupt the performance. The incidents were brought to light by Sahitya Akademi Award-winning playwright Jayant Pawar, in an open letter he wrote recently urging the art fraternity to speak up against the police’s behaviour and express their outrage. Early last month, Delhi-based theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam) was to perform a play, Tathagat, at multiple venues in Mumbai.
'In yet another instance of an institution bowing to political pressure, the Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya Memorial Trust, created in memory of the pre-independence nationalist leader and educationist, cancelled permission for a seminar on democratic rights. The Trust had given permission to the organisers to use the premises of the Malaviya Smriti Bhawan, which it owns, to hold a seminar titled ‘National Convention in Defence of Democratic Rights’ on August 31 and September 1.
'The Press Council of India (PCI) has sought permission from the Supreme Court to intervene in a petition filed by Kashmir Times executive editor Anuradha Bhasin which demands an end to communications restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir.
But though the statutory object of the country’s media watchdog is to “preserve the freedom of the press”, the PCI petition describes the ban on communication and free movement, which many local journalists say has severely affected the functioning of the press in J&K, as being “in the interest of the integrity and sovereignty of the nation”.
