THE publication of final NRC in Assam has drawn the attention of the whole country. Not only now but for last couple of years, with the publication of first draft, stories related to NRC are hitting the headlines in all forms of media. The question of ‘stateless’ people it may create has been keenly watched by the international media as well. Perhaps now it needs no repetition that till now the NRC was unique and specific to Assam only. In independent India, only Assam had prepared National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 1951.

HALIMA Khatun is a middle aged woman, who has been detained at the Kokrajhar Detention Centre in Assam for over 10 years. She has four children who live with her husband in Nagaon district. Except for her, the entire family has been declared as an “Indian” in the NRC process. Similar is the story of Arti Das who is also from Nagaon; she has been lodged in Kokrajhar Detention Centre for the last three years, while her husband is detained at the Tezpur Detention Centre. But their two children are ‘bonafide’ Indian citizens.

AMAZON Rain Forest has been burning at a record rate since August 2019. The raging forest fire has not only been continuing but also expanding.  The core of the fire ball is in Brazil, encompassing the area of Equator and Peru. Brazil has at last declared a state of emergency because of this devastating fire in the region.

SANGH Parivar is desperately trying to portray Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as a brave anti-imperialist freedom fighter among the youth of our country. To showcase him as a brave personality, the RSS family calls him “Veer Savarkar”, this is the nomenclature of VD Savarkar popularised in Vidya Bharti school textbooks and in RSS shakhas.Despite all these efforts, the Sangh family has failed to establish Savarkar as a youth icon. But they haven’t given up.

THE state conference of the TNUEF (Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front) was held at Thanjavur from August 15-17.  The need to strengthen this organisation and the many struggles and agitations that it organises was borne out by the fact that in just the month preceding the conference, there had been two incidents of brutal ‘honour killings’ in which both husbands and wives had been murdered because of their inter-caste marriages;  one elderly dalit had been murdered in the neighbouring district of Rameswaram;  and, on the very eve of the conference, an attack on dalits had taken pla