by Aravindan Neelakandan - Dec 14, 2020 01:44 PM
Sikh people watching the installation of the Baba Banda Singh Bahadurâs statue at Nabha House, the Wall of Truth memorial to the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the museum at Bangla Sahib Gurdwara, in New Delhi. (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Snapshot
The Congress under Sonia Gandhi and family has ensured the partyâs further descent into the Nehruvian politics of divide and rule while Narendra Modi represents the polity guided by the values of the RSS.
What is being done today in the name of anti-farm reforms agitation also brings to the surface another undying dimension of the crafty politics played by Indira F Gandhi and her political think-tank cabal: pitting Sikhs against the non-Sikh Hindus, amplifying the fear psychosis latent in identity politics.
Sarika Sharma
A confidential letter from Mesopotamia in March 1916 called urgently for 450 latrine sweepers from India. In temperatures unlike what they had ever faced in India, the Indian Labour Corps had been constructing roads, railways, bridges. Basra was to be a major port to launch the military campaign during World War I. When Radhika Singha came across this letter dated March 1916 at the National Archives in New Delhi, she wondered why it was marked “Confidential”. More research revealed that there had been a cholera outbreak in Basra and “.sweepers were going to be placed in jeopardy at the epidemic front”. Later, dhobis were to be called in, too, tasked with disinfecting military hospitals, exposing them to high risk. By the time the Mesopotamia campaign ended, 3,000 men from Indian Labour Corps had died in Basra alone. During the five-year commemorations of the Great War, not a tear was shed for these dead. Singha’s new book, ‘The Coolie’s Great War’, righ