Weekend Reads “[Disha] Ravi’s arrest has spotlighted a different kind of collusion, this one between the increasingly oppressive and anti...
Weekend Reads
- “[Disha] Ravi’s arrest has spotlighted a different kind of collusion, this one between the increasingly oppressive and anti-democratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Silicon Valley companies whose tools and platforms have become the primary means for government forces to incite hatred against vulnerable minorities and critics — and for police to ensnare peaceful activists like Ravi in a high-tech digital web,” writes Naomi Klein.
- Lubhyati Rangarajan, Tejaswita Kharel and Harini VS look at 10 sedition cases filed over three years to 2020, and see how “the police apply sedition charges with little thought, evidence or legal justification and ignore a series of judicial rulings by high courts and the Supreme Court.”
- “India’s democratic exceptionalism is now withering away,” writes Ashutosh Varshney. “Democracies do not charge peaceful protestors with sedition, do not have religious exclusionary principles for citizenship, do not curb press freedoms by intimidating dissenting journalists and newspapers, do not attack universities and students for ideological non-conformity, do not browbeat artists and writers for disagreement, do not equate adversaries with enemies, do not celebrate lynch mobs, and do not cultivate judicial servility.”
- “While every internet user in India needs oversight and accountability from big tech, it should not be at the cost of increasing political control,...
