'“In my SIT (Special Investigation Team), there are three ACPs and seven officers, and we have been working day and night“, announced DCP (Crime) Joy Tirkey during a January 10 press conference by Delhi police on JNU violence. The officer laid down the purported sequence of events that led to a rampage in the varsity campus on the intervening night of January 5-6. He began with alleged vandalism of servers by students opposing hostel fee hike to stop registrations for the winter session of the university...
'A total 10,159 students committed suicide in 2018 in India, highest number ever in the category, according to the latest data by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). While the number of students committing suicides has been surging year after year, it is important to understand the enormous distress among the students across the country, who are currently part of a collective movement against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)...'
'Students and civilians who gathered on Thursday near Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) to protest the violence in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were lathi-charged and a dozen of them were detained from the location by police. Protesters alleged they were lathi-charged by the police near Shastri Bhawan even though they were marching peacefully from MHRD towards Rashtrapati Bhavan after students met HRD ministry officials... A female protester who was present at the demonstration alleged she was hit by a male cop.
'On 8 January 2020 evening, I attended a Concord, New Hampshire town hall for presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and raised signs regarding her association with the Nazi-inspired RSS paramilitary. I was immediately violently assaulted by Gabbard campaign thugs, who attacked me for quietly and peacefully holding signs reading “Tulsi: Mascot of India’s KKK” and “Tulsi Whitewashes India’s KKK.” Before that point, I was silent and doing nothing but holding signs. I was joined by five other people doing the same thing.
'At least 10,349 people working in the farm sector ended their lives in 2018, accounting for 7.7% of the total number of suicides in the country which was 1,34,516, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The 2018 figure is less in comparison to 2016 when 11,379 farmers killed themselves, according to the agency which is responsible for collecting and analysing crime data... The data of 2017 was not made public by the NCRB in its report released on Wednesday. According to the report, a vast majority of farmers who killed themselves were men...'
'...Put on the back foot by widespread protests against the new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the BJP’s new strategy appears to be: catch them young. “We must protect our nation from traitors (Bharat ke gaddaron se hume apna desh surakshit rakhna hai),” Sumita Suman Singh, mahamantri of BJP’s Uttar Bharatiy Morcha, told a gathering of about 1,000 of students, aged 9 to 17, and 40 teachers from Shree Dayanand Balak, Balika Vidyalay & Junior College at Matunga yesterday.
'There are rumblings of discontent in the tribal villages around the much promoted Statue of Unity (SoU) in Gujarat. The tribal population of as many as 72 villages is opposing the Statue of Unity Area Development and Tourism Governance Bill 2019 that was passed by the state assembly last month. Protests by the tribals are largely going unreported by the media, or or the reports are just being confined to the local pages of the vernacular as well as English dailies.
'India lost over $1.3 billion in internet shutdowns across the country — lasting 4,196 hours in 2019 — making it the third-most economically affected country after Iraq and Sudan, says a new study. The report, titled The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns, in 2019 by internet research firm Top10VPN, worked on calculating the data in major regions of the world using the COST tool. The tool was developed by internet monitoring NGO Netblocks and advocacy group The Internet Society, and uses indicators from the World Bank, ITU, Eurostat, and US Census...'
'The students of Jawaharlal Nehru University have been agitating to get the proposed fee hike rolled back for weeks now and adding to this are the anti-CAA protests. In the midst of these, on January 5, masked men and women entered the campus, hitting students and destroying public property. This attack has led to fresh dharnas inside the university campus which have been covered by the media extensively.
'Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched a door-to-door campaign in Madhya Pradesh to drum up support for the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) and the National Population Register (NPR), it has been unable to quell discontent brewing among its own workers. The anger was apparent when two senior office-bearers of the Madhya Pradesh BJP Minority Cell resigned from the party in protest against CAA-NPR-NRC. Now, many of their colleagues have decided to follow suit and plan to hold a meeting on January 11 to discuss ‘en masse’ resignations from the party.
