Absent in India’s schools, which help reinforce power imbalances, is any real acknowledgement of street-level efforts to push back.
country: India
Stay updated with comprehensive news on India from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on Indian politics, economic developments, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include New Delhi, Mumbai, and events like Diwali.
The contemporary crises of our world – climatic, democratic, technological, economic, epidemic – can no longer be understood or contained within the logic of nation states.
NEW DELHI — India is a cricket-crazy nation. We love our cricketers and some of us even worship them. Also, we love our cinema. We look up to the reel life heroes and admire them with the expectation that they are real life heroes. But what happens when these influencers do something unexpected? When we keep someone on a pedestal we, unknowingly, keep them in the position of authority and give them the power to influence us, our decisions. From their fashion sense to their political ideologies, we believe everything they do could be correct, since they’ve achieved something we […]
In a rush to bolster its image, the Modi government is giving away coronavirus vaccines that will do little for the country’s international standing and would be better served at home.
It’s stupid to expect people without any medical training to understand how each vaccine candidate has been evaluated. Public accountability offers an alternative.
The forced abortiona of a Hindu woman married to a Muslim man should be treated like murder by the state. Yet, not much is being said about it, or other ways new laws are used to disenfranchise Muslims.
Hindu nationalist groups want to force the cancellation of Netflix shows that celebrate inter-religious romance with Muslims — it’s both censorship and ethnic prejudice.
A growing number of women — farmers, students, ASHA workers and others — have joined the demonstrations. Others support the effort by staying home to tend family farms.
Despite decades of violence and tension between opposing army outposts, villagers caught in between have no choice but to keep living their lives.
Demarkated by the British for tax purposes, these villages have since been swallowed by India’s massive capital city, but continue to stand apart in terms of zoning and design.
From the moment the movie began, I had a funny feeling. First, there were no opening credits — nothing to tell us who the producers or director were nor what famous actors would appear. No sign of even the author’s name, like they showed in The Godfather. But I had seen Batman Begins, so I […]
The pandemic has prompted many city workers to seek refuge back in the countryside roots. For the government, it’s an extra challenge, but also an opportunity for long-term rural development.
-Analysis- NEW DELHI — It was mid-September 2014, India was abuzz with the visit of Chinese president, Xi Jinping and his wife, folk singer Peng Liyuan. Televisions channels played an extended video loop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting on a swing with Xi on the banks of the Sabarmati River, while excited anchors foretold an era of Sino-Indian peace, forged between the two strongmen who had come to power within two years of each other. Six years later, the Modi-Xi relationship lies in tatters, as do ties between New Delhi and Beijing. With Chinese soldiers having marched across the […]
Hindutva is a menace of Indian society, and to confront it head on, liberals need to stop celebrating the supposedly tolerant Hinduism of yesteryear, historian Partha Pratim Shil argues.
-Analysis- CHENNAI — “What is this?,” my curious seven year old asked, picking up a pack of sanitary napkins, as I found just the right position to take a picture to accompany an article on a menstrual hygiene movement in Chennai. I paused for a minute, and replied, “These are like thin diapers that girls wear for around one week every month.” I was caught off guard, and mentally kicked myself for the diaper reference. He looked suitably impressed with the design on the package and inspected the pads as well. We don’t have cable TV so he hasn’t been […]
When Pakistani fisherman Abdul Karim Bhatti, who had been a prisoner in India for seven months, was flown home to Karachi, Pakistan, at the end of July, his family didn’t rejoice. They were receiving his dead body. The only information they received was that he died on July 1 at the B.K. Hospital, Bhuj. Or so stated the death certificate, a bilingual document in English and Gujrati, issued on July 9 by the government of the state of Gujrat. No postmortem was carried out. The Indian maritime security forces had arrested Bhatti, along with other fishermen, on January 8 and […]
The Narendra Modi government has largely ignored the Tibetan leader, who lives in exile in India, but the country’s military leaders now say support for the iconic monk could be the perfect way to push back on China.
Unless we question the socio-economic structures associated with the production of waste and waste management, we’ll never dig out of the waste crisis.
Artist Balvir Singh and his murals of revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Lenin have helped rekindle socialist ideas in his home state of Punjab.
From salary cuts to protective equipment shortages, frontline workers are having to protest and plead just to get their basic dues.
Even if researchers’ quest for the coronavirus vaccine concludes quickly — and that’s a big if — the solution would still need to me manufactured, packaged, paid for and distributed.
How is the pandemic panning out in the world’s second most populous country? Science editor for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth, offers some statistical insight.
So far there’s been little obvious effort to hold authorities accountable for the rising number of people — especially Muslims, Dalits and other minorities — who die while in police custody.
-Analysis- NEW DELHI — In a discussion on NDTV about the contents of the third tranche of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”s stimulus package for the economy, Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s most respected psephologists, called it “entertainment.” Yadav is a gentle human being who goes out of his way to avoid giving offense, above all on TV. So “entertainment” was the most civilized word he could think of. I will be a little more blunt. Not just the third tranche, but the entire “stimulus package” advertised by Modi on May 12 is a gigantic confidence trick being played upon a […]
Anti-Muslim attitudes are ‘eating away at the idea of India’ and finding expression even among the country’s cosmopolitan elite.
For some, anti-Chinese rhetoric following the killing of 20 Indian soldiers is conjuring up memories of a dark and mostly forgotten chapter in India’s history.
The coronavirus crisis could reshape how the country’s leadership goes about its business.
Zooming in on the territory in question and the shifting history between Asia’s (and the world’s) two biggest nations.
To mitigate the high economic costs of the pandemic, it’s time to demand greater contributions from those who can afford to pay.
The pandemic and the response to it threaten to exacerbate entrenched economic and social disparities.
A view from India on the prospects of major upheaval in the short-term and the possibility of a lasting economic depression.
The facility’s peculiar focus may seem a bit funny at first. But as visitors are quick to discover, having access to hygienic toilets is no laughing matter, especially in India.
As the ‘center’ continues to shift rightward — in India and elsewhere — people need to do more than just push back against the powers that be.
The government had said that ‘rural Indian men’ would not take orders from a woman commander. It’s just a cover for the sexism of the ruling class.
By now, many across Delhi, and Sikhs across the world, are retriggered by memories the pogroms of 1984.
While there are significant supply chain concerns across sectors in the short-term, others see this as yet another distant opportunity to take some business away from China.
India’s space program will use a female android named Vyommitra to test the crew module ahead of its first crewed flight. Why did the robot have to be female? And where are the real women astronauts?
CHENNAI — Twenty-six-year-old Arivu’s small room, on the fourth-floor terrace of an apartment in suburban Chennai, is as lively as his music. It is in this room that Arivu shot his now iconic rap song “Sanda seivom”, which effortlessly rips the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens apart. Pictures of Ambedkar and Buddha are looking over him and an ektara (the instrument) standing tall. “It was a gift from the Tata Institute for Social Sciences when I recently visited them,” Arivu says. “I intend to learn to play it and even use it in my rap.” A single […]
With automated electronic surveillance systems, suspicion does not precede data collection but is generated by the analysis of the data itself.
India’s cutting digital access for political reasons also costs livelihood for small businesses, women’s safety, access to transport, food, education and almost every other aspect of a modern life.