Category: India

  • JMM, Congress and RJD in a joint press conference urged Governor Ramesh Bais to clear the confusion prevailing in the state

  • The prime minister also urged people to watch the Swaraj serial, which highlights contributions of freedom fighters, on Doordarshan

  • Jharkhand chief minister and 44 MLAs leave for picnic amid political crisis

  • The bench said prima facie two issues, including not providing Enforcement Case Information Report, requires reconsideration

  • The Supreme Court also stated that five of these phones were found to be affected by some malware, not sure if it was Pegasus

  • Several AAP leaders have made remarks regarding the Bharatiya Janata Party’s alleged attempts to overthrow the Delhi government

  • Brigadier Rana said the captured terrorist revealed his identity as Hussain, a resident of Sabzkot village of Koti in Pak-occupied Kashmir

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • Brigadier Rana said the captured terrorist revealed his identity as Hussain, a resident of Sabzkot village of Koti in Pak-occupied Kashmir

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • 160 votes in favour; BJP walks out, Speaker quits amid drama

  • Separately, searches were conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation today at multiple locations in Bihar and Ranchi in Jharkhand

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • We will fail Operation Lotus in Delhi once again, said AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj

  • Raja Singh released on bail, Party issues 10-day showcause

  • Lawyers for Jagtar Singh Johal say he was given electric shocks after unlawful arrest in Punjab in 2017

    A British Sikh campaigner is facing a possible death sentence after the UK intelligence services passed on information about him to the Indian authorities, according to a high court complaint.

    Lawyers for Jagtar Singh Johal from Dumbarton, Scotland, say he was tortured, including being given electric shocks, after his unlawful arrest in the Punjab in 2017 where he had travelled for his wedding.

    Continue reading…

  • Bench directed the Election Commission not to pass any orders on Shinde faction’s plea that it be considered the real Shiv Sena

  • The plea was filed by member of the CPI(M) Subhashini Ali, journalist Revati Laul, and social activist and professor Roop Rekha Verma

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • The Indian Ministry of Defence (MOD) has recently issued a commercial Request For Proposal (RFP) to the domestic deep tech startup QNu Labs to procure an advanced communications solution based on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology. The MOD’s move is likely driven by concerns over the advancements made by its neighboring rival China in QKD […]

    The post India’s RFP for quantum communications solutions likely driven by China’s advancements in QKD development, says GlobalData appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Asserting that all the allegations against him were false, Sisodia said he will never bow down before ‘conspirators and corrupt people’

  • Some of the Opposition parties still view the JD(U) leader with suspicion citing his numerous U-turns

  • MHA directs DGPs of bordering states to keep a close watch on demography of bordering areas

  • Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said the honest end up paying the price in CBI raids

  • AAP MP Raghav Chadha said the raids were conducted by ‘BJP’s CBI’

  • Sisodia too had demanded a probe by CBI in the alleged irregularities in the Excise Policy

  • CBI has registered an FIR in connection with alleged irregularities in formulation and execution of Delhi Excise Policy

  • The blocked 7 Indian & 1 Pakistan-based YouTube news channels had a cumulative viewership of over 114 cr and were subscribed by 85.73L users

  • Prima facie, there is no terror angle, but it is unclear why it was carrying arms, Fadnavis said

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.

    It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.

    Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, ‘whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle’. The CPI(M) formed committees in thirty wards of Jakkaloddi, a part of Warangal, and began to prepare people for the coming fight. The epicentre of the struggle was land that the government had taken in the late 1970s from an old aristocrat, Moinuddin Khadri, using the Land Ceiling Act of 1975. Rather than distributing this land to the landless, however, the government evicted farmers from part of it and then gave the land to leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party in 1989.

    Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on 18 June 2022.

    On 25 May 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organise the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3am on 20 June, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Four hundred people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: ‘This site is for the construction of a court complex’.

    Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for sixty days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On 26 June, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total.

    Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.

    The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.

    Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.

    Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.

    Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.

    The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin – some 3.6 million residents – held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This – along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.

    Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.

    These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu (‘inspiration songs’):

    We will not move an inch
    till we get land for our homes,
    a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
    We shall fight those who stop us.
    On this land, the red flags we raised
    stand ready for battle.

    Birds nest in the branches.
    Insects have homes in leaves.
    We, who are born human,
    thirst for a roof of our own,
    for a patch of land for a home.

    Drifting from place to place
    in make-shift huts,
    the shame of no address to our names.
    Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
    with the pain of no place to call our own.

    Well-healed bosses
    steal thousands of acres
    in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
    For a little patch for which I ask,
    the sticks beat me to the edge of death.

    You, who have come to ask for our vote:
    We demand food and shelter.
    We are ready for battle till we get them.
    We dare you to stop us.

    We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.

    The post When People Want Housing in India, They Build It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • The Ministry has blocked seven Indian and one Pakistan-based Youtube news channels under the IT Rules, 2021

  • Jammu and Kashmir Police have made several arrests in recent months in the drone case

  • Jaishankar said many suppliers of India have diverted their supplies to Europe, which is buying less oil from Russia

  • The apex court adjourned hearing till August 22 on a plea relating to suspension by FIFA of the All India Football Federation