'This is the ‘desh badal raha hai (the country is changing)’ story in all its finery. It encompasses everything and makes no attempt to hide anything: communal tension, society’s attitude towards inter-community marriages, right-wing assertion on ‘deviant’ women, Beti Bachao-Sanskari Banao, the partisan attitude of the police and media, and the helplessness of the judiciary. Anjali Jain (22) met Ibrahim (34) at a college festival and fell in love. They got married in February 2018. Ibrahim was already married when he met Anjali, but estranged from his wife whom he subsequently divorced.
'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.
'V.P. Rajeena, a journalist based in Kozhikode, has become the target of organised online abuse, after she shared her personal experiences of studying in a madrasa in her younger days. Facebook closed down her profile on Wednesday after mass reporting by her detractors. On Sunday, Rajeena put up a post in the social network on alleged instances of immoral conduct of madrasa instructors, which she claimed to have witnessed. The post touched a raw nerve and set off a torrent of abuses and open threats on her Facebook page and in her message box.
'The age old practice of shunning menstruating women from temples has been placed effectively under the scanner now by a 20 year old Facebook campaigner named Nikita Azad. Support for her is snowballing into a massive drive. Her campaign ‘#HappyToBleed’ was started in response to a priest of Sabarimala temple in Kerala who said that they will allow women to enter the temple, only after a machine is invented to detect which of them are menstruating. “There will be a day when a machine is invented to scan if it is the 'right time' (not menstruating) for a woman to enter the temple.”
"Among the many myths about Indian society is an ancient one — that we are, and have always been, a tolerant society. It is an old yarn to cover the prejudices, discrimination, oppression and violence that have, unfortunately, marked our history. The intolerance is most pronounced when it comes to matters concerning identity — not religious identity alone, but every kind of strongly-believed identity such as caste, gotra, language, region etc... We celebrate the life of a Saint Ramanuja or an E V Ramasamy (“Periyar”) or a Mahatma Phule or a Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
"The consternation witnessed around release of religious figures in Census 2011 has rather overshadowed an interesting fact which has emerged through this mammoth exercise. It tells us that India has 2.87 million people who have no faith in any religion, which is around 0.24 per cent of our population. Definitely it includes not only atheists, rationalists but all those people who do not believe in any faith but some ‘unknown’ force.
"A recent study showed how home owners in NCR were discriminating against Dalits and Muslims. In an interview to Amulya Gopalakrishnan, Tarunabh Khaitan, associate professor in law at the University of Oxford and the author of A Theory of Discrimination Law, talks about the implications of segregation... Consider a hypothetical case: a landlady refuses to let her house to me because my zodiac sign is Capricorn. Her eccentric refusal does not affect my opportunities; none of us can claim to have a moral right to live in any particular house.
