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Showing posts from May, 2021

Farmers’ mobilizations and the agrarian crisis

       The agricultural laws proposed in 2020 by India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government - the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act - have led to a series of events: the resignation of a cabinet minister in September 2020, peasant suicides, and protests by various farmers’ organizations since November. The largest protest rallies have taken place around Delhi. In the months following the start of their protest, the farmers, mainly from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, but also from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, camped around the city, ready to stay there for months until their demands are met.   A protest march in Delhi on 26 January, 2021, India’s Republic Day, took a militant turn. Farmers stormed the historic Red Fort and the police responded with tear gas and batons. Riot police and p

Parallel Between Corona Pandemic and ‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus

“And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually seen him dead, a million corpses broadcast (through history) are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” Albert Camus ‘The plague’ by Albert Camus (1947), narrates a fictional outbreak of epidemic in Oran where the people like every other modern town were cultivating habits of making money and spending weekends in the cafes. They were busy in their lives so much that when the disease break out, they wrapped themselves into disbelief about the existence of the disease, convincing themselves that it is a bad dream which will pass away. But it didn’t happen the way people hypothesized and from one bad dream to another it wasn’t the dream but the ‘men’ who passed away. The plague ravaged Oran because the people of the town had forgotten the modesty of life, they were convinced that plague is no more than a memory of medieval world.               The same catastrophic reaction was prevalent when the Corona virus be

The arrogance of the obsession with the religious identity.

    Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities of gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.                                                                                          -- Amartya Sen, “Identity and Violence: The illusion of Destiny” The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement started as a reaction to the Police Brutalities in the U.S.A. The movement wasn’t a new one, it is just a recent reflection of the struggle that the People of Colour have been continuing since the inception of the U.S.A under their Constitution. It is a movement for the assertion of rights that the Constitution of the U.S.A promises them. But with the technologically advanced connectivity system, that we are having these days, the movement wasn’t restricted within the boundaries of the U.S.A., infact the whole world stood for it. There existed and still, there are existing Twitter #tags, Facebook status, Instagram stories, and many other activities