On 9 February 2012, a day before second phase elections in Uttar Pradesh, Union Law Minister and a senior Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh (UP) Salman Khurshid made a claim in Muslim-majority Azamgarh that shocked his fellow Congressmen in Delhi. He said national party president Sonia Gandhi had wept when he showed her photographs of the victims of Batla House encounter. In September 2008, Batla House encounter took place in the neighbourhood of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia where two alleged terrorists from Azamgarh were killed. One of them was a student of Jamia. Repeated requests by civil society groups, university teachers as well as senior Congress leaders like Digvijaya Singh and Khurshid for an investigation was turned down by Congress party’s own Union Home Minister P Chidambaram. The party simply refused to take a clear position even as its own government calls it a genuine encounter.
Category: Opinion
Personal Opinion of Kunal Majumder on issues of importance
On 2 February 2012, hours before lawyers and judges met on the Supreme Court (SC) of India lawn to bid Justice AK Ganguly farewell, the retiring judge and his colleague Justice GS Singhvi dropped a bombshell on the government. Ganguly and Singhvi, who were part of the bench hearing the $15.4 billion telecom scam case, cancelled all the 123 telecom licenses allotted by the government.
I am a trained medical doctor with a specialization in child health. I completed my MBBS from the Christian Medical College, Vellore in 1972, and completed studies leading to the award of the degree of MD (Paediatrics) of the Madras University, from the same institution in 1976. After this, I joined the faculty of the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and worked there for two years, before leaving to join a field based health programme at the Friends Rural Centre, Rasulia in Hoshangabad, MP. During the two years I worked there, I worked intensively in the diagnosis and treatment of Tuberculosis and understood many of the social and economic causes of disease. I was also strongly influenced by the work of Marjorie Sykes, the biographer of Mahatma Gandhi, who lived at the Rasulia centre at that time.
Paper presentation made by Kunal Majumder at Institute of South Asia Studies, National University of Singapore
Please note: All the opinions in this paper are entirely personal and does not reflect my publication’s editorial stand
On April 6 earlier this year, Maoists ambushed a heavily armed Central Rapid Police Force (CRPF) battalion in the jungles of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, and blew up an armoured vehicle. Within hours, 76 soldiers were dead.
It is quite amusing to see how geo- political differences can influence the coverage of events that have cultural acceptability across borders. KUNAL MAJUMDER scans Dawn and The News of Pakistan, and The Daily Star and The New Age of Bangladesh in search of two words ‘AR Rahman’ and ‘Oscars’.