Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015)
Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey).
Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst); Ajay Bhardwaj (Vancouver).
Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
This issue of INSAF Bulletin is dedicated to school children who died of poisoned foods!
WORLD’S LARGEST MID- DAY- FREE-FOOD-FOR-SCHOOL CHILDREN IN TROUBLE: A FEAST FOR CRITICS
Daya Varma and Vinod Mubayi
More than twenty school children succumbed to death in the village of Gandawan in Bihar after consuming food contaminated by poisonous chemicals. This unfortunate incident naturally caught the attention of national and international media. Speculations about the cause ran wild as was the case following the Bhopal disaster of 1984. This disaster has brought into question the desirability of the program of providing free meals to schoolchildren in India. Read more…
NATURAL RESOURCES ARE NATIONAL RESOURCES
Vinod Mubayi and Daya Varma
In a just and rational, but ideal, world, natural resources anywhere in the world would be the common property of all the people of the world. The oil discovered under the desert sands of Saudi Arabia was created by geological phenomena millions of years ago. Ideally, it should not be the property of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz or the crown prince any more than the people of India or China or other countries. Geophysical changes over eons produced hydrocarbons at one place and diamond at another. None are the product of the labor of any one as they were created long before homo sapiens came into being. But the real world must be conceived not in such idealistic conjectures but the reality of nation states that are just one or two centuries old. Read more…
HINDU NATIONALISM VERSUS INDIAN NATIONALISM
Ram Puniyani
The debate around Hindu Nationalism and Indian Nationalism is not a new one. During colonial period, when the rising freedom movement was articulating the concept and values of Indian nationalism, the section of Hindus, keeping aloof from freedom movement asserted the concept of Hindu Nationalism. The debate has resurfaced again due to the one who is trying to project himself as the Prime-Ministerial candidate of BJP-NDA (Bhartiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance), Narendra Modi. In an interview recently (July 2013) said very ‘simply’ that he was born a Hindu, he is a nationalist, so he is a Hindu Nationalist! His Party President Rajnath Singh also buttressed the point and took it further to say that Muslims are Muslim nationalists, Christians are Christian Nationalists. So one has a variety of nationalisms to choose from! Read more…
WHAT ABOUT 1984?: POGROMS AND POLITICAL VIRTUE
Mukul Kesavan
The stock response of the Bharatiya Janata Party to the argument that Godhra makes Narendra Modi politically untouchable is “What about 1984?” There are several inadequate comebacks to that question and the best of them is that no one should use one pogrom to justify another. Read more…
PAKISTAN: WHY WE CAN’T RID SOCIETY OF WEAPONS
Naeem Sadiq
With each blast, massacre and killing, Pakistan as a state, fails one more time. How many citizens will be slaughtered or blown apart by militants before our delusion gives way to reality? Pakistan stubbornly continues to live in a state of denial, refusing to acknowledge that it is being brutally attacked by a bloodthirsty enemy from within and without. Read more…
CHANGING INDIA
Kancha Ilaiah
(The article below expresses the sentiment of and analysis by a Dalit intellectual. Ed.) Read more…
INDIAN MUSLIM YOUTH: GROPING FOR EQUITY AND SECURITY
Ram Puniyani
In a most communities youth have a serious struggle on hand to look beyond the present for the future, especially their careers, longing for dignity and a decent existence. While this applies to all the youth, the struggle of youth from marginalized and discriminated against communities are much more. It is on this terrain that, Chetan Bhagat, the popular writer turned columnist, decided to advise Muslim youth about their future path, choices. His advice came in the form of an article, a letter from a Muslim youth, in a leading daily. The article was so insensitive to the plight of Muslims; it amounted to blaming them for their own plight; and so subtly advised them to opt for leaders like Narendra Modi. This was not a direct advice, Modi’s name was not spelt but the hint was obvious. Read more…
FACE TO FACE: MUKUL SINHA
Sadiq Naqvi
Mukul Sinha is an eminent lawyer and civil liberties advocate based in Ahmedabad. He has doggedly pursued the search for justice since the State-sponsored Gujarat genocide of 2002, case after case, in multiple testimonies to the commissions, investigations, inquiries and documentations, inside and outside the courts, and in the public and political arena. Despite all odds, and despite threats from powerful quarters and an atmosphere of sectarian terror prevailing in Gujarat since 2002, he has rigorously, meticulously and with extraordinary courage, evidence and resilience, pursued the process of justice, including the facts behind the many fake encounters. Here, he describes in detail the conspiracy behind the cold-blooded killings. Read more…
INDIA: NSSO RELEASE KEY INDICATORS OF EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT
The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has released the key indicators of Employment and Unemployment in India, from the data collected in its 68th round survey conducted during the period July 2011 – June 2012. The NSS surveys on employment and unemployment are conducted quinquennially starting from 27th round (October 1972 – September 1973) and the last quinquennial survey was conducted in NSS 66th round (July 2009- June 2010) for which, the results have already been released. Read more…
NOTES FROM CHINA
William Dere
I want to give some of my impressions of my month long travel through China. Read more…
OBAID SIDDIQI 1932- 2013: CATALYST OF A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY
K. Vijay Raghavan (July 26, 2013)
Obaid Siddiqi, once a young star of molecular biology and later a pioneer in neurogenetics was an extraordinary intellectual and scientist. In building the Molecular Biology Unit (now the Department of Biological Sciences) and then the National Centre for Biological Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, he showed how catalyzing a culture of creativity is vital to long-term institutional success. With his death following a road accident the world of science has lost one of its most thoughtful and questioning leaders. However, his science and the schools he as built will stay and through their quality demonstrate the stay of his deep influence. Read more…
ACCLAIMED SCIENTIST OBAID SIDDIQI NO MORE
(The Hindu, July 26, 2013)
Celebrated biologist Obaid Siddiqi, a scientist nonpareil whose pioneering work shed light on how taste and smell are detected and coded in brain, died on Friday. Read more…
PROFESSOR OBAID SIDDIQI PASSES AWAY
Obaid Siddiqi FRS, National Research Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) passed away on 26 July 2013. He is survived by his wife Asiya, sons Imran and Kalim, and daughters Yumna and Diba. Read more…
OBAID SIDDIQI: SOME REMINISCENCES
Iqbal Niazi
(Iqbal Niazi is a distinguished biologist and much older than Obaid. I requested him to write something about Obaid; although he is not in good health, he struggled to write the note produced below. Daya Varma) Read more…
OBAID SIDDIQI
Vinod Mubayi
I knew Obaid quite well when he was at TIFR in Bombay and I was there too. I also used to meet his wife Asiya from time to time. His intellectual accomplishments in molecular biology are well known and is the subject of the obits we are carrying. Read more…
OBAID SIDDIQI: THE INTELLECTUAL SYMBOL OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA
Daya Varma
I have known Obaid Siddiqi since 1950. After a lapse of many years I met him when he was in Pennsylvania in 1960’s and again few times when he visited his son Kaleem and daughter Yumna in Montreal in 2000s. Read more…
SHARMILA REGE: 1964-2013
Divya Trivedi
Sharmila Rege, the scholar whose work on the interplay of patriarchy and caste oppression broke new ground for both sociology and women’s studies in India, died in Pune on Saturday aged 48. She had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer. Read more…
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