The India Forum on government propaganda; sexual violence, periodic labour, the new agricultural laws, and more

By Dilip -

The torrent of fake news from groups sympathetic to the ruling party that flows through the Indian public discourse everyday is a phenomenon analysed by Neelanjan Sircar who writes of the 'disinformation' that is curated and then disseminated under centralised control to intimidate and harass critics as well as caricutarise the Muslim community.

It is a year since Hathras when a young Dalit woman was gang raped and murdered. There has been no let-up in the sexual violence against Dalit women, and children. V. Geetha offers us an understanding of the unrelenting violence at this political and social conjuncture

How does one make sense of the contradictory findings of the Periodic Labour Force 2019-20, whose coverage included the national lockdown of March-May 2020? Ishan Anand & Anjana Thampi look at a longer period of three years of the PLFS to discern trends in employment and wages. The picture is dismal. This detailed analysis follows the piece last week by Rahul Menon who discussed the complex and difficult task of measuring unemployment in India

Ankur Bisen uses the Allahabad High Court's recent denial of bail to a man accused of cow slaughter to make a 'modest' proposal: either accept the duality of the cow's existence as a commercial asset and a sacred animal, or stop altogether the commercial sale of cow's milk.

In the second episode in the podcast series on farmers' protests, we speak with Mekhala Krishnamurthy on how changes to the mandi rules and regulations could affect farmers.

How can marginalised communities deal with Covid-19 when they distrust the top-down approaches of modern medicine? NS Prashanth and co-authors tell us of how one community of Adivasis, the Solegas of BR Hills in Karnataka, confronted the entry of the pandemic



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