Articles by Harsh Mander
Protect our children, they are living on the edge
In the harsh winds of tight-fisted governments and prejudiced state administrations, safety for poor children will remain a distant mirage
Updated on Oct 25, 2015 11:30 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Dadri lynching has raised troubling questions on India’s ‘secularity’
Campaigns against cow slaughter that we witness in different parts of India are not about love for the cow, but hate for fellow Indians writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Oct 06, 2015 11:17 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Public dissent and debate are robustly expressed in India
Public dissent and debate, including a defence of the secular, continue to be robustly expressed in India today.
Updated on Sep 03, 2015 10:21 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Many degrees of hopelessness in India's villages
The Socio-Economic Caste Census shows that without a real social safety net, rural India is becoming a wasteland of distress and despair.
Updated on Jul 30, 2015 02:34 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Is the govt threatening to dismantle National Food Security Act?
The NDA, by its casual indifference to laws and court rulings, is threatening to dismantle the National Food Security Act.
Updated on Jul 09, 2015 01:40 AM IST
Amendments in Juvenile Justice Act prevents children's reform
The proposed changes in the Juvenile Justice Act snatch from vulnerable people below 18 a chance to reform themselves
Updated on Jun 08, 2015 03:37 AM IST
Modi government: one year of dismantling the welfare state
Governance moves toward a state which nurtures globalised markets and private investment, and trusts markets to enable people to purchase healthcare, education, nutrition and social security.
Updated on May 20, 2015 01:44 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
India has become a more unequal society than any other time in its recent history
In newly independent India, there was a resolve to acknowledge and reverse the country’s history of entrenched inequalities, and to build on its strength of effortless diversity. But this resolve has weakened greatly in recent decades. As India made a new tryst with the market, the number of people relegated to the margins of our society has also grown dramatically, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on May 07, 2015 09:40 PM IST
For an idealistic young civil servant it’s a lonely battle
The country is both riveted and moved by the extraordinary outpouring of public support, solidarity and goodwill by ordinary people for young IAS officer DK Ravi, found hanging from the ceiling fan in his official apartment.
Updated on Mar 23, 2015 08:14 AM IST
Harsh Mander, New Delhi
Neglect and abuse: The reality of India's elderly people
We often assume that our greatest dangers are from strangers on dark streets or from violent men who might break into our houses. The sad truth is that the highest perils of brutal and persistent violence lurk within the intimate spaces of our homes, from those to whom we are closest. Little illustrates this with more poignancy and immediacy than a recent 12-city study by Helpage India. Its stunning finding is that every second elderly person who its researchers spoke to testified to suffering abuse within their families.
Updated on Mar 02, 2015 11:00 PM IST
None | Harsh Mander, New Delhi
AAP has got the chance to run authentically responsible govt
AAP has the historic opportunity not just to rewrite the rules of Indian politics — which it has already done — but also of running a government which is authentically responsible and responsive to its most disadvantaged residents. A government which cares.
Updated on Feb 13, 2015 01:12 AM IST
The conversion crusade: Competing for people’s souls
Criminalising religious faith carries grave dangers especially in an aggressively majoritarian climate. It can browbeat minorities into fear and submission in the way blasphemy laws have done in Pakistan, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Jan 13, 2015 11:10 PM IST
Delhi’s indifference to 1984 riots led to other massacres
It was Delhi’s deliberate amnesia and indifference to the lives mangled by that great frenzy of collective hate which paved the way for other massacres in other cities, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Dec 13, 2014 07:25 AM IST
Harsh Mander, New Delhi
Need to clean our biases first, then our streets
The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Cleaning India requires dismantling the deadweight of India’s inequalities and the neglect of women and people of disadvantaged castes and religions.
Updated on Oct 22, 2014 11:31 PM IST
‘Gujarat model’ of communal politics flourishing in UP
Social hatred has replaced the tradition of shared living in Uttar Pradesh. This will render the next generation much more amenable to communal politics, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Sep 12, 2014 02:03 AM IST
The silence on the rising communal tempers is deafening
In the three months since Modi’s spectacular triumph, many corners of the country have begun to smoulder in slow fires of orchestrated hate against India’s Muslims and this is mostly unnoticed by the majority, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Aug 27, 2014 10:53 AM IST
None | Harsh Mander
There are no two ways about it
Two divergent perspectives compete in new India about the role of the State for social protection of its people. The chasm between these two evaluations is so large that conversations across these except the most caustic have broken down.
Updated on Aug 14, 2014 11:09 PM IST
India's courts in the dock, fail to give justice to Dalit village
The acquittal of the 21 men serving life terms in the 1991 Tsundur massacre once again confirms that for the oppressed, justice is hard to secure, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Jul 21, 2014 09:04 AM IST
Bengali Muslims can't be ‘cleansed’ by massacres and rhetoric
The Bodo Territorial Council had appointed surrendered Bodo militants as foresters, and armed them with rifles. The surrendered militants never had been seriously disarmed by the state government.
Updated on Jun 21, 2014 10:44 AM IST
Is rejection of UPA the rejection of secularism, welfarism?
The dust has settled on India’s most massive, noisy, expensive and bitterly fought election. This was no ordinary election. What was waged was no less than a battle for India’s soul. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on May 28, 2014 09:36 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Be prepared to stand alone
If the hot political winds blow in a direction opposed to our pluralist idea of India, we need to speak out against the politics of hate and injustice.
Updated on Apr 17, 2014 12:13 AM IST
Here's how you could stop the next communal riots
Sometimes laws if crafted with courage, wisdom and compassion carry the potential to change the destinies of a people. One such law — if we get it right — is the communal violence law, writes Harsh Mander.
Updated on Feb 20, 2014 10:03 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
India must win justice for victims of Muzaffarnagar riots
It is a worrying trend that those committed to dividing communities for immediate electoral gains can accomplish this so easily. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Feb 03, 2014 02:19 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander
Children at the rainbow’s end
Ferdinand van Koolwidj’s death makes one wonder why it took a Dutch man to dream of an India where no child has to sleep hungry, writes Harsh Mander, Director of Centre for Equity Studies.
Updated on Dec 23, 2013 11:11 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander, New Delhi
No room for hatred, as winter session is UPA's last chance
The continued human suffering and cynical engineering of social ruptures in Muzaffarnagar is another reminder of the imperative for a law to prevent further communal violence.
Updated on Nov 21, 2013 10:00 PM IST
Why MP farmer who killed his daughters deserves mercy
There is a class bias in awarding the death penalty. It is not a coincidence that the majority of those who faced the gallows in 2012 are poor. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Oct 14, 2013 11:42 AM IST
By the people. For the people?
The fear voiced by sceptics that ordinary Indian people would not rise to the demands of responsible republican citizenship has proved completely unfounded. If democracy thrives in India, it is because of ordinary people who claim and reclaim it in myriad ways, in the hope that maybe one day it will change their lives. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Sep 28, 2013 07:20 PM IST
Yet another doctored riot
The Muzaffarnagar countryside in western Uttar Pradesh is reeling under the gravest communal clash the country has witnessed since the 2002 Gujarat carnage as many resolve never to return to the land of their ancestors. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Sep 27, 2013 08:17 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander, New Delhi
It’s the bare minimum
Forget what sceptics say, there’s no replacement for State investments to ensure that all people have work, food, education and healthcare. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Aug 27, 2013 10:25 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Harsh Mander, New Delhi
After the inferno
Thanks to the government’s lopsided policies, even a year after the communal clashes, peace in Assam remains fragile. Harsh Mander writes.
Updated on Aug 21, 2013 08:35 AM IST