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. So far this year almost 73,000 numbers of areas have experienced the raging forest fire; but alarmingly, the number crossed 80,000 in the last week.

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.

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

CONSIDER the severe all round attacks on women’s rights in the last two and a half months of which are recounted here: the gruesome rape and attack on a 17 year old girl in Unnao and the BJP government’s negligence and political defence of the accused bylawmakers of the ruling party; the passing of the Triple Talaq Bill which will render many Muslim women destitute; the passing of the Wage Code Bill in Parliament which dilutes the Equal Remuneration Act; the passing of the bill, which provides for death penalty under the POCSO Act; the reduction in the budget for women’s security, the histo