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Category: Politics

December 6, 2021 / Dolly Kikon

How the Culture of AFSPA Murdered the Naga Coal Miners

Indian armed forces ambushed and killed 17 coal miners in Nagaland Mon’s district. An official report stated the killings as a case of mistaken identity during a counter-insurgency operation. The Home Minister of India, Mr. Amit Shah described it as an unfortunate incident, while the Chief Minister of Nagaland offered his condolences to the bereaved families and assured justice according to the law of the land. What do the inhumane extra judicial killings of civilians followed by apologies tell us about the state of India democracy?

March 16, 2021 / Raiot Collective

[INTERVIEW] Hareswar Barman on Raijor Dal, Assam Elections & Communal Fascism

Hareswar Barman is currently a candidate from Raijor Dol from lower Assam constituency of Rangia. He has been an important political organizer in Assam for many decades, jumping into active political life since he was in school in standard eight. He has been a living part of dealing with the questions of community/class dialectic as it played out in Assam over time.

He has been associated earlier with the erstwhile URMCA (United Revolutionary Movement Council of Assam, formed with the initiative of CPI-ML-PCC Vaskar Nandy group), when the question of ethnic community assertion, autonomy, federalism, class-based mobilizations and so on, were particularly stark in the 1970s and 80s. Being part thus, he has principally opposed dominant Assamese subnationalism’s chauvinistic strains of the time. Later on, he has been one of the architects of the Abodo Suraksha Samiti (Committee for protection of non-Bodo communities), which wielded its own set of experiences. It is one of the healthy signs in the current political juncture in Assam, that is re-energizing experienced committed political organizers like Hareswar Barman to enter active politics again.

March 13, 2020 / Mike Davis

COVID-19 : The Monster Is Finally At The Door

This history – especially the unknown consequences of interactions with malnutrition and existing infections – should warn us that COVID-19 might take a different and more deadly path in the slums of Africa and South Asia. The danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments. The only published piece that I’ve seen claims that because the urban population of West Africa is the world’s youngest, the pandemic should have only a mild impact. In light of the 1918 experience, this is a foolish extrapolation. No one knows what will happen over the coming weeks in Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi, or Kolkata. The only certainty is that rich countries and rich classes will focus on saving themselves to the exclusion of international solidarity and medical aid. Walls not vaccines: could there be a more evil template for the future?

March 2, 2020 / Arundhati Roy

“We have work to do. And a world to win.” : Arundhati Roy

A democracy that is not governed by a Constitution and one whose institutions have all been hollowed out can only ever become a majoritarian state. You can agree or disagree with a Constitution as a whole or in part—but to act as though it does not exist as this government is doing is to completely dismantle democracy. Perhaps this is the aim. This is our version of the Corona Virus. We are sick.
There’s no help on the horizon. No well-meaning foreign country. No UN…
What we need are people who are prepared to be unpopular. Who are prepared to put themselves in danger. Who are prepared to tell the truth. Brave journalists can do that, and they have. Brave lawyers can do that, and they have. And artists—beautiful, brilliant, brave writers, poets, musicians, painters and filmmakers can do that. That beauty is on our side. All of it.
We have work to do. And a world to win.

February 19, 2020 / ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA

Nationalising the Brahmaputra

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SAW THE emergence of many ideas related to meaningfully transforming the Brahmaputra to serve the government and the country. Experts toyed with ideas on how to tame the river. If other rivers of the world could serve the cause of the governments of the countries through which they flowed, why should the Brahmaputra not be trained in similar ways? It was only a matter of the appropriate calculations and necessary engineering works. What was called for was a plan for the river’s regulation to achieve the desired goals. The river, despite its erratic temperament, was bound to behave according to the rules thus framed. After two centuries of political, economic, intellectual, and bureaucratic negotiation, the river has become part of India’s national imagination. India’s stake in the Brahmaputra is now firmly established. The genealogy of this belief in the expertise, knowledge, and governance of the river goes back to the mid-nineteenth century as the example of the Kalang, a distributary of the Brahmaputra, shows. The Kalang is the river on the banks of which I have partly grown up.

January 26, 2020 / Akhil Gogoi

Akhil Gogoi’s Open Letter to the Leadership of Assam’s National Organisations

Translation of Akhil Gogoi’s open letter he handed over to his comrades when he was presented before a special National Investigation Agency court in Guwahati on 24 January 2020. Akhil Gogoi, mass peasant leader and RTI activist from Assam, was arrested on 12 December 2019 by Assam Police and later handed over to the NIA. He has been booked under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and a case was registered against him under section 120(B), 124(A), 153(A), 153(B) of the IPC and section 18, 39 of the UAPA.

January 25, 2020 / Petitions & Submissions

What Are The North Eastern Universities’ Students Saying About CAA 2019?

The students fraternity of the North Eastern Universities along with various other organisations gathered today at Bhupen Hazarika Kalabhumi, Tezpur to stage a massive protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019.
The main objective of the meet was to create a common platform among the universities across Northeast who are actively protesting against Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. The meeting highlighted the peculiarity of the north-eastern region in relation to the draconian Act. The narrative which has emerged in the region focuses on different ground of discrimination faced by the indigenous people in the eight states in the periphery. That the continuous influx of ‘illegal immigrants’ have rendered us hopeless had been addressed. Not only does the Act pose a threat to the indigenous cultures of the Northeast, it also seeks curb our right to actively dissent and express our fear. The student representatives came to an agreement that although they stand in solidarity with the protests going on in the mainland India they demand solidarity of the nation to understand the concern of the Northeast and the valid concerns of the many communities. They condemned the police atrocities on the students, both inside and outside the college and university campuses.

December 20, 2019 / Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh

Constitutional Lies and the Afterlives of Law in Kashmir

The abrogation of Article 370 has been accompanied by many colossal whoppers about its politics and history, and deliberate disinformation about the consequences for legal and constitutional rights and status. Yet in Kashmir, from where I write this, none of it matters. It is all of a piece with India’s long history of lawlessness and lies in the name of law. In the face of overwhelming ontological insecurity and terrifying state brutality, no one, not even the lawyering community (such of them as are not busy filing habeas corpus and bail petitions or themselves hiding from arrest), can be bothered to pore over the niceties of how exactly the deed was accomplished. With no Internet access many Kashmiri lawyers I speak to have not so far been able to read the full text of the two Constitutional Orders that altered their fate. What, after all, is a legal sleight of hand or an elaborately constructed constitutional lie when you have not spoken to a beloved daughter in two months? Who cares if Tulsi Gabbard (“who?”) or the late Arun Jaitley (“he died?”) misrepresent the nature of property rights that daughters enjoyed under your one-time, so-called semi-autonomous legal system? Many had not heard that this was even a thing. When I informed them, seething with indignation, they shrugged. “Yes” they said. “They lie.”

December 14, 2019 / Jiten Bezboruah

Do we return to the Nineties?

Despite massive protests against the CAB, the BJP formed government in Assam in 2016 with a vast majority. Our apprehension that Hindu nationalism has devoured Assamese nationalism has been proved true over and over again. We may have raised certain demands at the level of parliamentary politics which are against Hindu nationalism, but culturally we are gradually stepping inside the deep and dark tunnel of Hindu nationalism. Hegemony of neoliberal and Hindutva ideology has been gradually established in our society. We have witnessed many people becoming euphoric at the news of the four rape-accused being shot dead in an encounter by the Hyderabad Police, including people who are nationalists, who are known as progressive-democratic. How could Assamese people support encounters? The blood-soaked history of Assamese nationalism makes it impossible. But now it has also become easy in Assam. This change is easily recognisable if one looks at the reactions to the various incidents happening in Jammu and Kashmir, including the abrogation of Article 370. This is just one example. Does it mean that although we vocally oppose Indian national aggression, we are gradually embracing the ideology of Hindu nationalism? We will have to find out a rational answer to it from the protest movements happening at this moment. As of now, these protests are characteristically different from the earlier protests—firstly, these are much more aggressive than the earlier protests and inclusive of people from all sections of society; and secondly, the people of Assam have firsthand had a good taste of the BJP’s rule and their ideology during the period since the earlier protests. That is why we hope that these protests shall not be like the earlier protests—unlike earlier protests, these protests should not go back to the point of their origin where the protests need to be restarted from again. These protests must take us a step forward, engender a qualitative transformation in us.

December 13, 2019 / Raiot Collective

Register of Conflict: NRC and Ethnic Politics in Assam

The tenor of the anti-CAB mobilization in Assam has been somewhat different from elsewhere in the country—here, the CAB debate is inseparable from the debate on the National Register of Citizens (NRC). With an eye on how the terrain of the CAB-NRC debate has shifted in the last few months, it would be the right time to turn our attention to the second half of this notorious CAB-NRC combine. In fact, the way in which CAB has been pushed through reveals much about how the NRC process may be expected to play out, and how Hindutva fascism actually intends to deal with the demands and aspirations of the many nationalities that fall within the borders of its imagined Hindu empire.
There were many in Assam who were cautiously optimistic about the NRC process—they had hoped this would end, once and for all, the discrimination against Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims as Bangladeshis. But not anymore.

December 13, 2019 / Mr. Berham Pooter

Speaking amidst spies and drones in Latasil, Guwahati, Assam

In the morning of December 12, 2019 most people around the Uzan Bazar, Ambari area of Guwahati had come out to see who had assembled at the Latasil field and hear some of the speakers they were sure would come: Zubeen, Samujjal and others who had been vocal in their opposition to to the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). Before mobile internet services were shut down at 1900 hours on December 11, 2019, many citizens of Guwahati had updated their status to ask people to come to Latasil grounds at 1100 hours the following day. The messages had a ring of defiance to them. In an age that demands distraction via the world wide web, the status updates managed to help individuals focus on the event that they were coming out to participate in.

December 13, 2019 / Ranjith Oraon

To Understand AntiCAB Protests in Northeast, Look at Jharkhand

A big shot editor while explaining the CAB and situation in Assam and its neighboring states, puts the majority of Tribes of Assam under the Hindu religion. And when taking about the Tripura he accepts that tribes over there have been pushed to minority by immigrant Hindu Bengalis who rule the place now. And he calls it a democracy, the logic of numbers! And he also go on saying that how people from northeast are now working in main land India which is good sign and it should happen both ways.

December 12, 2019 / Raiot Collective

“I have never seen anything like this in my life”

A dispatch from Guwahati before the internet shutdown, from Ankur Tamuliphukan , a History Research Scholar I have never seen anything like this in my life.…

December 12, 2019 / Shuddhabrata Sengupta

The Real Horror of CAB & NRC

Indian Liberals must understand that the CAB and the NRC are truly pernicious and evil, not simply because they are against Indian Muslims. By and large (outside Assam) they are not. So let’s stop pretending that this is the case. If you happen to be a non-Muslim Indian liberal, then you need to understand that stating that you will now ‘register’ yourself as a ‘Muslim’ because of the CAB and the NRC, is not something that will affect your citizenship status by even one jot. This is not and cannot be ‘civil disobedience’ because an Indian citizen registering as a Muslim ‘disobeys’ nothing and nobody insofar as citizenship is concerned. That is a matter under the ambit of the law pertaining to conversion, not citizenship. We need more than token gestures of this kind.

December 11, 2019 / Richard Kamei

Listen Indian Liberals, You Know Nothing About North East India!

Why is it so hard for Indian Liberals to understand that CAB is both anti indigenous people, and anti secular? To label the protests in northeast as a call for “everyone kicked out” and xenophobic is simplistic and historically ignorant when there are ways to seek solutions without the need of inconveniencing, traumatising, and harassing people who do not belong to indigenous people.

December 7, 2019 / Freny Manecksha

Adivasis Establish Their Truth About The Murder Of 17 Villagers In Bastar

It is a night that Kamla Kaka will perhaps never forget. A mitanin (health care provider) trainer she had returned to her village in Bastar, Chhatisgarh, after a visit to Bijapur, some 52 km away where she had gone for a delivery case. “I had eaten my meal and was listening to songs when the loud burst of firing startled me. Many of us rushed out from our homes. We wondered why the forces had entered our village and were firing continually. It went on and on and later there were flare bombs that illuminated the area. A vehicle arrived later and picked up our dead but many of the armed personnel stayed on,” she told me when I met her earlier this year.
Among the dead were three relatives and her nephew Rahul Kaka, the 15-year-old-son of her father’s brother (chacha). “A class nine student he was so special to me,” she added.

October 27, 2019 / Parvin Sultana

“Assam: The Accord, the Discord” – A Review

The final list of NRC published on 31st August, 2019 is a culmination of a long drawn process that can be traced back to the state politics of Assam in the pre independence period. The state’s history is marked by incidents which continue to shape the politics of the state. Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty’s book Assam: The Accord, the Discord tries to do exactly this – revisit the roots of the problems and understand when the seeds of discord were sown.

August 28, 2019 / Nandita Haksar & Sebastian M. Hongray

When Naga Students in Shillong Protested a Racist Bollywood Film

In 1973 a Hindi film Yeh Gulistan Hamara came. Before the screening of the film we had read about the film in Filmfare. That magazine was very popular. After I read about the film, I realized it is politically motivated and I started campaigning against it. Dev Anand and Sharmila Tagore were the actors. Sharmila played a Naga girl and she was named Sekrenyi which is the name of a holy festival of the Angamis. The actor came with elephants to a Naga village. He brought sweets and biscuits to court the Naga girl and teach her writing and reading. And in the end the Indians conquered Naga country with the help of the forces. We said our country was never conquered by Hindustan. The Naga students protested and tried to get the Khasi students to join us because the film also depicted Khasis as backward. But Khasis did not understand. On top of that, the Meghalaya government relaxed the entertainment tax also.

August 20, 2018 / Abhimanyu Kumar

What is happening in Khunti, Jharkhand?

The flash-point was reached when a team of women belonging to an NGO performing a play in Kochang, a remote part of the district where the rogue militia of PLFI – People’s Liberation Front of India – rules the roost, were allegedly raped. The general impression in the state is that PLFI is a creation of the state police, to counter the Maoists who are said to be on the decline in Jharkhand, if the claims of the government are to be believed. The government quickly blamed the Pathalgadi leaders for the alleged gangrape. Without producing any evidence, it chose to tar the entire movement by the tribal population fighting for its rights. In an instance of terrible chicanery and perfidy, the local media parroted the allegations without making any background checks of its own.

August 14, 2018 / Umar Khalid

They can’t scare us into silence!

If they believe that with attacks like this they are going to scare us into silence, then they are gravely mistaken. The ideas of Gauri Lankesh, the ideas Rohith have outlived them. They cannot browbeat us into silence, neither with their jails, nor with their bullets. We proved it yesterday itself.

August 5, 2018 / RACHEL SYIEMLIEH

Social Media Vitriol On The Proposed KHADC Amendment of Lineage Act

Although the amendment Bill has been returned by the Governor, we have become betrayers: for simply asking for a re-consideration. We haven’t even taken a non-Khasi spouse yet. From personal attacks to violent threats… we don’t need to delve into the dark web to find a bunch of people abusing and threatening one of their own.

June 25, 2018 / Freny Manecksha

Affirming right to know truth

A day before Eid, a Twitter storm with the hashtag #InquireKashmirKillings erupted. Notwithstanding the pall of gloom caused by the killing of respected editor- in-chief of Rising Kashmir, Shujat Bukhari by unknown gunmen on the very day that the report by the UN on the situation in Kashmir vis-a-vis human rights was released, Kashmiris hurled themselves into battle.

May 19, 2018 / Bonojit Hussain

How the hell South Korea has a history of radical left politics

Professor Kim is a well-respected progressive academic in one of the numerous Universities of Seoul (SungKongHoe University), where I have also spent several good years – for the first year as a scholar and later as a Research Professor. But I never had the opportunity to chat with Professor Kim about politics. He spoke only Korean and Russian; and I spoke only English and ‘unintelligible’ Korean. But Professor Kim, was, and still is well known among students as the ‘nutty professor’ who, as a PhD student, went to Moscow to study in the early 1990s. As the rumour goes, study was just an excuse for him- in reality, he wanted to (un)confirm his worst nightmare: whether the Soviet Union has truly collapsed or was yet another western capitalist propaganda.
To anyone today it would appear that he was ‘crazy’. After all, why do you need to go to Moscow to see for yourself whether the Soviet Union has collapsed or not?

May 5, 2018 / Raiot Collective

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin on Marx, Marxism, Freedom and the State

This collection of extracts from the works of Mikhail Bakunin are taken from his writings touching on his controversy with Marx over the nature of the state and its role in the liberation of the international working class. Written between 1867 and 1872, many of Bakunin’s predictions about the outcome of following the authoritarian communist road have been proven valid by the actions of Marxist Leninist authoritarians across the world.

May 2, 2018 / Rev. Kyrsoibor Pyrtuh

Hato ki Nongtrei-Nongbylla kin lah mo ban synshar Ha Meghalaya?

Jingkren jong K Pyrtuh ha ka Sngi Kyrpang Ki Nongtrei-Nongbylla 1 tarik Jymmang 2018

April 28, 2018 / Thma U Rangli Juki (TUR)

Ka Pali Ki Rit Ki Ria Ki Nongtrei Nongbylla

Kum ki nongtrei-nongbylla ngi shem ba ka don ka jingpynkhein ia ka Riti Synshar ka Ri, ka jingpynkhein ia ki ain ba dei kyrpang na ka bynta ki nongtrei nongbylla ne ki labour law da ka Sorkar Jylla Meghalaya,ka Sorkar Pdeng bad ruh da ki riew shimet bad ki Private Company. Kane ka jingpynkhein ia ki ain kiba iadei bad ki nongtrei-nongbylla ka la ktah shibun ia ka jingim ki nongbylla bad ka dei ka jingleh bein bad ka jingniew bein ia ki nongtrei-nongbylla kiba noh synniang shibun sha ka ioh ka kot bad ka roi ka par jong ka Ri.

April 23, 2018 / Basharat Ali

Erasing Muslim/Kashmiriness of Kathua Victim

what does the Indian left-liberal solidarity choose to do differently about a people who, one can argue, are doubly colonized? They choose to express their ‘desire’ for the “beautiful woman” by exporting a girl, who faces multiple hierarchies of oppression besides the double colonization of her community, to their mainland and call her “another Nirbhaya” or “India’s daughter”. They stress that Aasifa’s rape and murder is an ‘issue of humanity’. By deliberately trying to erase the specificity of the case, they are obfuscating their complicity in the crimes the Indian state has committed in Kashmir in their name for all these years.

April 19, 2018 / CARLA BERGMAN & NICK MONTGOMERY

My radical politics is more radical than yours

Can radical politics harbor a deadening conservatism? CARLA BERGMAN and NICK MONTGOMERY on the stifling air of Rigid Radicalism

February 15, 2018 / Thma U Rangli Juki (TUR)

Kaei Kaba Ki Nongtrei-Nongbylla Ki Angnud Na Kane Ka Elekshon 2018?

Hynne ka sngi ka 14 tarik u Rymphang 2018, 13 tylli ki Seng jong Ki Nongtrei-NongBylla, Ka Seng Ki Nongdie Madan ryngkat bad ka TUR ki la pynlong ia ka “Bread and Roses Campaign” lane “Ka Pliang Ja kaba dap bad ki Syntiew Kulab” kaba dei ka tien phira jong ki Nongtrei-Nongbylla; kaba mut ba ki Nongtrei-Nongbylla ki dei ban skhem bad shngain ha ka kam ka jam, ka kamai kajih khnang ban im ban dap ka ja ka doh, ban ioh ka koit ka khiah bad ban biang ka pule dangle ki khun ki kti. Ym tang katta ki don ruh ka hok ban kmen ban risa bad ban pynjah thait da ki rong biria ia ka jingim kaba lwait Kumta ha kane ka campaign ne ka jingiawer paidbah la pyllait ruh ia ki mat jingdawa kaba mih na ki jingiatai jong ki nongtrei-nongbylla kaba la long ha ki bnai bad snem kiba la lah.

February 10, 2018 / Debarshi Das

The Union Budget: What does it have for peasants, workers and the common people?

Cheerleading “economics” year after year, we have ended up creating an unequal country which has few parallels. About a third of the fruits of economic growth experienced since 1980 has gone to the richest 1% of the country. Hardly any other country has seen such yawning gap between the rich and the rest. The degree of inequality has been growing. In the beginning of this century the top 10% of the population cornered 40% of the income. By 2014 their share rose to 50%.

January 31, 2018 / Arunabh Saikia

BJP struggling to shed its anti-Christian image in Garo Hills

Can #BJP make inroads in Garo Hills? What will #Congress do with people’s anger? Arunabh Saikia’s report on #MeghalayaElections

January 29, 2018 / Raiot Collective

Quest for a new Rahul Gandhi – ver 32.1 MEGHALAYA ROCKER

#RahulGandhi is launching #Congress’s election campaign in #Meghalaya with a Rock Concert. RAIOT reveals the playlist.

January 22, 2018 / Nathaniel Marwein

Guide to Meghalaya’s election farce

“Where are you going Bahdeng?” I asked a friend of mine who seemed excited and in a hurry. He said, “I got a new job, I’m in the business of collecting money”. Not sure and intrigued by the true nature of his new profession, I congratulated him and tried to get more details about it. He enthusiastically told me that I should join in, “It’s very profitable” he said, “Yesterday I told them my mother was sick, the other day I said my daughter was sick; you see, I’m in the business of collecting charity money from candidates contesting the upcoming elections and so far I’ve received Rs.10,000”.

December 19, 2017 / Pratik Sinha

Gujarat Elections: a short note

This is an election where BJP was made to fight. This is not just about using political firepower but unlike other elections, channels like Times Now, Republic TV and ZEE had to become an extension of BJP without not even a shred of neutrality in their coverage. Local Gujarati media also became increasingly partisan as elections progressed. The Parliament session was delayed, all the resources were diverted towards Gujarat. EC even delayed Gujarat elections and their excuse for the delay was very flimsy. The delay helped BJP to partly tide over the GST anger by reducing tax slabs for certain items.

December 15, 2017 / Amrit

The Tale of Two Inter-caste Marriages

The news of a famous wedding has been hogging all the limelight in the media throughout this week. The excitement over Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli’s wedding to actress Anushka Sharma has been putting even the drama surrounding Harry Windsor’s Royal Wedding to shame. However, Virushka (their moniker, which wins my vote for the worst couple name. As a friend pointed out to me, why anyone would go with Virushka and not Korma is beyond me) is not the significant development in wedding related news to occur this week. The real story, which flew largely under the radar, was about Sankar and Kausalya, a Tamilian inter-caste couple that fell victim to a brutal murder.

December 12, 2017 / Dr. Sunil Kaul

[State of Nation’s Health] WHO CARES?

The media is currently rife with the debate about the exorbitant billing made by a five-star hospital in Delhi to the father of a young girl who succumbed to her brief illness. But is it the right debate? Are those throwing stones at the hospital not the kind who go to private hospitals themselves? Is it okay if private care is affordable and not exorbitant? At an individual level, I do not and would not like to ever submit myself to private health care. It is because I believe that medical care must never be treated as a commodity and must be available to every human equally.

December 6, 2017 / Raiot Collective

Babri Masjid Case : a Cheat Sheet

The Invisible Lawyer’s guide to the legal history of Babri Masjid case

December 4, 2017 / Parvin Sultana

A Tale of Two Evictions in Assam

Just like the people in Amchang, the people in Sipajhar were also victims of river erosion. Their earlier generations moved from places like Jonia in Barpeta to escape poverty and river erosion. These people were further tricked into buying government land from the locals of Kuruwa. But there was no investigation on the multiple level of exploitation that these people faced. Merely accusing them of being illegal immigrants somehow provided impunity to those who torched their homes. Not a single person was brought to book for taking law in their own hands. One must ask if these are illegal immigrants, why weren’t they sent to detention camps for gradual deportation?

November 29, 2017 / Rongili Biswas

Bhupen Hazarika – his leftist years

It is true that Bhupen Hazarika’s political views took a significant turn in his later life and in many ways he became the cynosure of conservative politicians of different hues. We should add to it our collective misfortune that there is no dearth of politicians in this country who can appropriate a cultural capital towards a political end and turn it to material/ military/ electoral gain

November 24, 2017 / Shyamolie

Dr. Hadiya will speak

The opposition to Hadiya’s conversion and their marriage has not been created or sustained merely by the right-wing, but also by those who have either chosen to stay silent on the case or have actively aided and abetted the state in furthering their persecution, whether it is the LDF government, or the Women’s Commissions, national or at the state level. Many feminists have otherwise spoken about choice and agency, but who, facing the will of a 25 year old Muslim woman to question the established norms of the Hindu household and life-world, have fallen absolutely silent. When she and Shafin are being pushed into a dangerous web of state-backed and NIA-produced rumour mongering of indoctrination and larger patterns, what good is silence? What good is half-hearted conversations around her right to choose, when they are suffixed with a “but…”?

November 22, 2017 / Gaurav Rajkhowa & Ankur Tamuli Phukan

Dubious Certainties: The NRC and Ethnic conflict in Assam

Assam has had a long and bloody history of ethnic violence arising from extremely complex reasons. Ethnic violence in Assam implicates cultural, political and economic aspects of relations between communities in ways that cannot be captured in a simple majority-minority, or a khilonjia-foreigner dynamic. Here, virtually every community has at one time or another been the victim as well as perpetrator of ethnic violence. And in the shadow of a militarized state, political antagonisms among various communities have often been shaped by the force of arms.

November 22, 2017 / Amrapali Basumatary & Bonojit Hussain

What does Akhil Gogoi believe in?

This interview by Amrapali Basumatary & Bonojit Hussain was taken in 2016 December, just two days after Akhil Gogoi was released from his 78 days of imprisonment by The Assam Government. For various reasons the interview couldn’t be published during that time. However, with the recent re-imprisonment of Akhil Gogoi under the National Security Act (NSA) in September 2017, we feel that it is important to bring this interview to public domain.

November 20, 2017 / Raiot Collective

Balei Ba Ym Dei ban Pyntreikam ia Ka Aadhar-based Biometric Authentication (ABBA)

Kane ka dei ka jingthoh jong ka Reetika Khera kaba kyrteng “Why ABBA must go”, kaba la pynwan sha ka ktien khasi da u Rev. Kyrsoibor Pyrtuh hadien ba la ioh jingbit. Ka Reetika Khera ka hikai Economics ha IIT Delhi

November 17, 2017 / Avner Pariat

Some thoughts on Cherry (late) Blossoms

Unlike Meghalaya, in Japan cherry blossom culture is “natural”, it has been celebrated, in some form or the other, over hundreds of years. It didn’t grow out of a need to impress tourists or to be an “international” PR event. “International” is the new buzz word which hurts my ears! And then I have to ask, why cherry blossoms? Why not ‘sohphoh’ blossoms? (a member of the apple family found widely in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills) Those blossoms are quite beautiful as well. At least the hardy and indigenous ‘sohphoh’ gives you fruits as well. Many locals use it to make jams, preserves and ciders as well so I am for the ‘non-international sohphoh’.

November 10, 2017 / Daniel Langthasa

[Mr. India] Listen to Indian HipHop & Buy some PUMA shoes

khareedo mera joota,
naam hain PUMA.

November 10, 2017 / Thma U Rangli Juki (TUR)

Meghalaya Social Audit Act is a flawed piece of legislation

An important legislation like THE MEGHALAYA COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION AND PUBLIC SERVICES SOCIAL AUDIT ACT, 2017 came into being without any element of Community Participation through Pre-Legislative consultation about its intent and content. Some of the remarks we make about the Act are due to this ‘failure’ on the part of the government to take the people and community into confidence about the law.

November 8, 2017 / Ram Bhat

How not to talk about Demonetisation?

It is one thing to say that demonetisation has failed empirically, but quite another to assume that it will lead to BJP’s defeat. On the contrary, Mr. Modi has jumped from one policy to the other, and every time, the residue in public consciousness is the honourable intention. Meanwhile the opposition parties seem to be completely unaware of these dynamics.

November 8, 2017 / Geeta Patel & Kath Weston

Remonetization, or, Life in the Flash Queue

It used to be said that Indians don’t queue. Clerks despaired of organizing the crowds that clamored for attention at service counters, and paying one’s electric bill in northern cities required a set of sharp elbows for jostling. In this context, postdemonetization bank and ATM queues were remarkable—not only for the very orderliness of their existence, but also for the intimacies they fostered and ways in which they rearticulated class and kinship.

November 8, 2017 / A. R. Vasavi

How Demonetization Was Made Socially Acceptable

No formal government program or agenda has been so socially malignant for India as the 2016 demonetization, both in the intent and manner in which the policy was deployed and in its impact on the working poor. While the forced sterilizations (nas bandi) of the mid-1970s were met with widespread subversion and eventually led to the fall of the Indira Gandhi government, the recent round of notebandi (literally, note ban) or demonetization was met by mass acquiescence.

November 6, 2017 / Raiot Collective

White Ink / Education Scam – Hall of Shame of Meghalaya Politicians

Congress, BJP, NPP, Independent, Regionalist. Corruption cuts across party line in Meghalaya. So presenting (drum roll) Education Scam Hall of Shame