Tag: protests

Popular Essays

A Refusal to Break Bread

By AMITA KANEKAR

It was widely reported – in practically all the Indian media reports on the farmers’ protest in Delhi of the past week – that the farmers’ representatives had refused the central government’s hospitality, even water. The protests, against the new farm laws which will open the doors to big corporate players in agriculture while ending the miniscule government support now available to farmers, started in Punjab months ago but garnered no response from the centre. With the protests having converged massively on Delhi now, and promising to become bigger and more widespread, the government has started talks with representatives of the farmer unions, but these talks, of which five rounds are over, have, according to the farmers, offered nothing. Except water, tea and lunch, all of which were refused by their representatives. They made do, instead, with refreshments brought from the langar at the main protest site at the Delhi-Haryana border. (more…)

Popular Essays

Intergenerational Equity: The Old and the New

By DALE LUIS MENEZES

The end of a calendar year often makes us reflect on the ‘old’ that we leave behind and the ‘new’ that we hope for. When most of the economic, social, and political problems that Goa faced last year, or even over the last few years, remain firmly in place, it makes little sense to hope for a better 2021. The pandemic, of course, gives us reasons to be even more pessimistic. We really do not know how 2021 will unfold, especially because the government everyday reinforces its spectacular inefficiency in handling the pandemic. It is for this reason that, rather than offering the usual clichés about a new calendar year, it might be better to reflect on some of the positive changes over the last six months. (more…)

Popular Essays

The Anatomy of Resistance: Society and Protest

By DALE LUIS MENEZES

 

India’s bid to be a superpower, or at least economically dominate the region of Asia has guided many policy decisions in the last decade or so. The Mopa airport is part of this scheme. Ever since the airport was proposed, circa 2000, India’s economic policy has consistently promoted airports and projected them as a way to allow small cities or towns, and rural areas to partake of the economic benefits of a surging economy, while also opening up these spaces for the investment of global capital and infrastructure development. The brunt of this ‘development’, as is all too familiar for Goans, has to be borne by the people on whom it is forced – especially the marginalized ones. The idea that smaller undeveloped areas can be included in the circuits of a surging economy – in turn benefiting the people of these regions – by massive injection of infrastructure investment simply does not hold water.

 

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Popular Essays

Fathoming a different Mothers’ Day

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

 

We live in times when commercial Mother’s Day ads stereotype the role of mothers, even as they do not give value to their work. We live in times when jingoism runs high and we are pushed into a situation where our concern as mothers – literally and figuratively – of the menfolk on the country’s borders has to be translated into applauding them for giving up their lives or losing their lives for the ‘nation’. We live in times when we are not expected to interrogate the circumstances and political diktats under which the armed force men became vulnerable to these killings.

 

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Popular Essays

When Malaysia Looks like India and Vice Versa

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

 

Malaysia’s Bersih movement was in the news recently. The Bersih movement is a movement for free and fair elections.  It has raised questions of how electoral rolls come to be drawn, and how constituencies come to be delimited in ways that ensure that the ruling party’s vote banks are appropriately configured within each constituency so as to give the ruling party a lead. This is so familiar to us in Goa where such constituency delimitation has been reorganised to facilitate the ruling party.

 

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