Thirty-eight years ago in June 1984, the army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, Amritsar on 3 June with a proclamation to “flush out Sikh militants entrenched inside the holy shrine”. An orchestrated official propaganda, managed by New Delhi power-centre sought to justify the entry of the army on the eve of Guru Arjun Dev’s Shaheedi Divas being observed[Read More…]
Since its emergence from the Anna Hazare movement against corruption in Delhi in 2012 the Aam Aadmi Party (APP) has remained on the positive side of Hindutva. Now after defeating the ruling Congress in the assembly polls of Punjab AAP publically claimed that it has become the replacement of Congress in the state but would also do so at the[Read More…]
Tragic happenings of the 1980s continue to perturb the Sikhs. Most of them want to know what actually took place behind the smokescreen erected by the power of the day. In this context, the new arrival ‘The Khalistan Conspiracy’-A Former R&AW Officer Unravels the Path to 1984” (2020) authored by GBS Sidhu, who retired as Special Secretary of India’s Intelligence[Read More…]
Enlarged farmers’ protests at Delhi that succeeded in mustering active support from adjoining states have forced the Modi government to leave its earlier stand that the Farm Act would bring ‘bonanza’ for the farmers. And in a way of confessing its error, the government has come down with a negotiating proposal for amending the Acts. But by exhibiting trust-deficit in[Read More…]
Ongoing farmer protests that turn into an encirclement of New Delhi, the power-center are no longer confined to the securing of assurance of Minimum Support Price (MSP) for wheat and rice in Punjab and Haryana. They have sharpened the sting against Indian policies of neo-liberalism. These policies have already led to the finance-capital control and privatization of health and education[Read More…]
In the first week of June, 36 years ago (1984) Indian army attacked the Golden Temple Amritsar, the holiest shrine of Sikhs for what was propagated to ‘flushing out terrorists entrenched there’. How much truth that official euphemism carried and how much the army action codenamed as “Operation Blue Star” succeeded in chastising the Sikh dissent has been and will[Read More…]
If the media speaks to power, then only a functional democracy could exist with accountable governance. Such an ideal situation could only be possible if the mainstream politics is proud of being secular, centrist or left of the center. The day mainstream politics begins to whip up ‘nationalism’ replacing the people’s issue, populism gallops to the center-stage for pandering the[Read More…]
Inducing Flag Waving Patriotism, Indian Media Stands Unmasked and Exposed Since Independence, the Indian media has been a carrier of flag-waving patriotism. Anything that infringed New Delhi’s project of ‘nation-building’ invariably fell into the ‘anti-national’ category deserving no sympathy or critical appreciation from the media. The Indian periphery- deep south, far west, Punjab, Kashmir, and north-east—have already experienced hostile press[Read More…]
The manner and intent of Indian Establishment in sending of the Indian army to the Golden Temple in Amritsar on 3 June 1984 and degradation in special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August (2019) bear a lot of similarities. Both actions were sudden and unexpected carried with excessive use of the armed forces. These two events were[Read More…]
The oath-taking ceremony by the members of newly constituted 17th Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian parliament) on 18 June 2019 turned into a virtual slogan-shouting contest between treasury and opposition benches. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party with overwhelming strength (303 MPs) hackled and taunted an MP of Muslim party, AIMIM from Hyderabad in[Read More…]
Otherwise, it seems improbable that Prime Minister Narendra Modi known for his penchant for photogenic tele-shoots with visiting foreign dignitaries should miss the opportunity offered by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a week-long visit to India from February 17 (2018). On his first visit to India, Mr Trudeau was received in the country by a junior agriculture minister.[Read More…]
At the outset, we must confront a bitter fact that it was a ‘transfer of power’ in 1947 which Indian rulers celebrated as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Independence’. If we use a terse coinage, it was a ‘systematic transfer of power’ between the colonial elite (Britisher) and the post-colonial elite (Congress). That is why, the pre-1947 imperial state has been continuing[Read More…]
India’s most decorated and retired police officer Julio Ribeiro remembered KPS Gill, former Police chief of Punjab, who breathed his last in Delhi yesterday (May 26,2017) as ‘the best operations officer ..who ended Khalistani terror.… who hunted terrorists down single-mindedly with spectacular success’. Naturally, Ribeiro was supposed to give such tribute to his departed colleague who was second to[Read More…]
Just held 2017 Punjab assembly election has not proved a different game from what RSS brand nationalism played on the demographically polarized chessboard of other northern Indian states that went to polls simultaneously. Much expected political change could not take place even as new entrant – Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) made its assertive debut in Punjab breaking the binary of[Read More…]
Of late, some thinkers of the Sikhs, a minority constituting less than two per cent of India’s population, are praising and advocating for a separate ‘nation-state’ as the best political solution for the emancipation of the besieged community. Such thinkers go to the extent of harrying and hounding those Sikh intellectuals who oppose the concept of ‘nation-state’, a Western[Read More…]
Usual interpretation of the Indian Apex Court verdict on ‘Jana Gana Mana’, the National Anthem on 30 November, 2016 as curbing of individual’s freedom could hardly fathom the real intention behind the judicial overreach which is meant to serve a larger purpose. The verdict is in tune with overall political-moral ethos of the time. And it lends an unambiguous support[Read More…]
The 10 November (2016) verdict of Supreme Court declaring the Punjab Act of 2004 as unconstitutional and reviving its earlier decree for expeditious completion of Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal has ripped open the old wounds which had brewed a decade long trouble in Punjab in 1980s entailing a spree of blood spilling. Not only the latest verdict affirms the centralization[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
