Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan discusses his 1992 film that captured the first attack on the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and why it is still relevant more than 30 years later
Pakistan’s military is obviously backing Nawaz Sharif and the PML–N, at the cost of Imran Khan and his PTI, but how long until it again falls out with an elected government it once supported?
Punishment often begins even before arrest in Bangladesh thanks to sweeping legislation, unchecked surveillance and police impunity – with marginalised communities and the political opposition as prime targets
The disproportionate policing and incarceration of Denotified Tribes and other caste-oppressed communities must be understood as a result of colonial and Brahminical power
Pakistan’s prisons remain terribly overcrowded and under-resourced, and nascent efforts at progressive reform are stymied by ingrained attitudes of discrimination, including against religious and ethnic minorities
‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit’, an anthology of prison poems, testifies to the coercive nature of the state and society – yet its under-representation of regional poets speaks of wider exclusions
Demands for a caste census are shaking up politics and prompting a fresh reckoning with historical injustices in India. Everywhere that caste is endemic, overdue caste counts have the power to do the same.
Prisons in contemporary Myanmar carry the clear imprint of colonial practice – and after the 2021 military coup, the facade of reform pushed during the transitional, semi-democratic period has peeled away
