'Amid nationwide protests against Citizenship Amendment Act in the country, taxi aggregator company Uber came under the scanner on Thursday after one of its drivers on overhearing a phone conversation of a passenger called the cops to "turn in" and denounced him as a "communist". CPI-ML member and activist Kavita Krishnan took to microblogging site Twitter, sharing screenshots of a conversation between her and poet Bappadittya Sarkar, who was the passenger during the incident. The poet, hailing from Jaipur, was in Mumbai as he was invited to read his work at the Kala Ghoda Festival...'
'Elections for the students union in the Central University of Gujarat saw all five candidates fielded by the ABVP, the student wing of the ruling BJP in the State, losing. Three seats were won by Left-leaning student outfits and the NSUI, while one seat went to an independent candidate. All the five candidates fielded by the ABVP lost...'
'About 70 lakh people lined up to form a 620km human chain across the length of Kerala on Republic Day, read out the Preamble to the Constitution and took an oath to preserve the country’s secular and democratic character. Men and women, young and old participated in the Great Human Chain organised by the state’s ruling Left Democratic Front, mostly along a national highway...'
'From politicians, writers and celebrities to men, women and children, lakhs of people came out to form a human chain from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) headed by the CPI(M) organised the protest with leaders of the coalition parties leading it at different points... According to the LDF, 70 lakh people participated in the human chain that stretched across 620 kilometers.
'With Narendra Modi visiting West Bengal on Saturday, Left groups organised to protest against the prime minister and his government’s plans to introduce a religious criterion in India’s citizenship laws... The day started with unprecedented efforts by Kolkata Police to ensure that Modi’s route from the airport to the city was barricaded and closed to protestors. In the end, even that failed, and Modi has to take a helicopter to travel the 16 kilometre distance.
'“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...
'Two photographs of JNSU president Aishe Ghosh have been juxtaposed together to portray that she plastered different arms at different times. Thus suggesting that her injuries are fake. Ghosh was injured during violence in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) where masked goons attacked students on January 5-6. Shefali Vaidya was among those who made the allegation but later took it down... RSS-affiliated ABVP’s national organising secretary Ashish Chauhan also shared the images. His tweet, now deleted, was retweeted by Dr Vijay Chauthaiwale, in-charge of BJP’s foreign affairs department...
'Ignoring bone chilling cold, thousands of people along with supporters and workers of Left parties and other Opposition parties took to the streets protesting against Citizenship (Amendment)Act 2019, (CAA) as well as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) during Bihar Bandh (shutdown) on Thursday. The shutdown badly affected normal life across the state.
'Last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that women of menstrual age could enter the Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala despite a proscription against this, the Kerala government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) decided to prove its social crusader credentials by backing women who wanted to exercise their constitutional rights to visit the shrine... But all it took for the Left government to forget about constitutional rights was one election.
'...In their book ‘Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India’ published in 2018, political scientists Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma demonstrated that Indian political parties and voters are strongly and consistently ideological. As part of the book’s quantitative work, they constructed an index of “the politics of recognition”, which looked at voter responses to questions relating to key issues of identity in successive rounds of post-election National Election Studies conducted by the Lokniti programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).
