India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
As journalists face punitive action for fact-checking and reporting hate speech by those allied with India’s ruling party, citizens are stepping into the breach, taking enormous risks to document rising instances of hate speech and hate crimes in the country.
Saadat Hasan Manto, born on May 11, 1912 in Ludhiana in British India, is an enduring literary icon and one of those few people that both India and Pakistan see as their own. However, in reality, Manto belonged nowhere, even whilst his art is poignantly treasured on both sides of the border.
New anti-caste writers and film-makers are setting a radical agenda in mass culture in Karnataka and beyond. Will their challenge to Hindutva hegemony travel north?
Current demographic trends do not threaten national well-being, nor is the Muslim population exploding. The annual gung-ho about population explosion is political, not factual. It is a ploy to shroud the failure of the governments on the socio-economic front.
If Uddhav Thackeray is able to broaden the ideological base of the Shiv Sena, it can help the party register electoral successes and start another era of inclusive politics. This of course means that Thackeray must walk on the razor’s edge, never tilting towards nativism and away from inclusivity.
There is growing conviction that the nation, language, and religion are one. Hindi ideologues see only Hindi as authentically Indian and Hindu. The current rhetoric is reminiscent of the ‘Hindi-wallahs’ in the early 20th century.
The Red Shirt rally, held on May 29, saw a coalition of Marxist, Dravidian and Ambedkarite groups unite against Hindutva for the third time in five years.
Gopi Chand Narang, who passed away on June 15, was a towering scholar who kept reiterating the secular, tolerant, inclusive and assimilative character of Urdu till his last breath.
At a time when Hindu fundamentalists, often aided by the government, have pushed or enforced bans or violence against minorities in Karnataka, a jurisdictional police chief in Bengaluru showed how the police could not just keep the peace but increase trust and traditional inter-faith relations.
The freedom to cite ‘national security’, unexamined, and as a reason to withhold information, or have a matter adjourned, or use the ‘sealed envelope’ method, are illustrations.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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