New Delhi, India – On the night of December 26, 2001, Mohammad Abdul Hai boarded a train from Jodhpur in northwestern India’s Rajasthan state to Surat city in neighbouring Gujarat to attend a three-day seminar on Muslim education.
The seminar was organised by the All India Minority Education Board, of which Hai – then an associate professor at Jodhpur’s Jai Narain Vyas University – was a member.
The three-day event was expected to be attended by nearly 400 Muslim scholars, activists and community leaders from across India.
Hai was excited about the seminar. But little did he know that the event was going to change his life forever and soon he would not only be called a “terrorist” and “anti-national” but will have to spend the next 14 months in jail.
View: The Bengal verdict will show whether identity politics will trump party-based affinities or not
indiatimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from indiatimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lecture on ‘India – secularism, democracy and socialism’
Eminent historian Romila Thapar has said that education should not conform to religious concerns in determining its content and structure. State-run institutions should be free of religious interventions and the contest of education is better left to the professionals in each discipline, she said.
She was participating an online lecture series on ‘India – secularism, democracy and socialism’ organised jointly by Kerala State Higher Education Council (KSHEC), Kerala Council of Historical Research (KCHR) and Chintha Publishers in honour of historian K.N. Panikkar on Sunday.
Cautioned
Prof. Thapar, Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, also cautioned against allowing religion to legitimise politics and political activity.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
February 09, 2021
Source: Getty
Summary: Indian Americans are now the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. Their growing political influence and the role the diaspora plays in Indian foreign policy therefore raises important questionsâabout how Indian Americans view India, the political changes underway there, and the course of U.S.-India relations.
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Since coming to power in 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made outreach to the far-flung Indian diaspora a signature element of his government’s foreign policy. Modi’s courtship of the diaspora has been especially notable in the United States, where the Indian American population has swelled to more than 4 million and has become the second-largest immigrant group in the United States.
Book Review: The Many Lives of Data in India
The book Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India , edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.
File photo of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) collecting data from a citizen for Aadhar. Photo: Reuters.
Tech06/Feb/2021
About a decade ago, the CEO of a data analytics firm I worked for in Bangalore vied for the data that would be produced by Aadhaar as it was expected to connect to a series of other datasets that practically governed our life. His repeated request to the representatives of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), at a presentation which the latter made on the companyâs premises, was simply to hand over the data to him. For a company whose main line of work was to interpret data for âintelligenceâ, which is to mine data for pointers on how to prolife
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