1)While UKSC's scolding a lower court that "democratically accountable" functionary's assessments on country's security can't be flipped, may create a difficulty for courts in countries that cite foreign rulings -Katju sahab's scolding by a UK court is a particularly tricky sitn.
2) on the face of it, the UK court has come out solidly behind the Indian SC. But it has also bashed an Indian SC ex-judge and shown no hesitation to publicly point out that his arguments are hypocritical and driven by latent political/ideological agenda.
3) This is something unimaginable in India, even at the hands of the only authority allowed to criticize a judge - that is a higher court/SC. Where perhaps, rightly or wrongly, any such admonishment wd be strictly in-camera for fear it would tarnish the "image" of judiciary.
4) Problem is that no matter where the admonishment happens, hidden or public, the tarnishing is entirely on perception by those vast majority who have no power over the legal system - whether criticism, reform, apportion guilt and responsibility and mete out penalties.
5) Indian judicial system left this problem hang out too long, seen as iconic in Markandeya Katju, but he is perhaps a symptom of the disease and neither the exception nor the cause. Public perception draws its own conclusions from visible contradictions, even if it is silent.
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Absolutely! While Hitler& Stalin has to be criticized heavily for their attitudes towards Untermenschen, they cannot be solely blamed for 9+ and 5+ million deaths respectively directly as a consequence of their orders. It was a culmination of n number of major factors.
Apparently in spite of this "huge loss of Burmese rice", as the famine got worse, 70,000 tons of rice were exported from India between January and July, 1943.
Famine not frm drought (which was in early-1940) as rainfall was above average in late-1943, considered to be the peak of the famine. The army+police systematically destroyed crops and grain stores of peasants deemed rebellious in the 1942 movement.
Both US and UK media constructs and uses distinct geographical identity as "race" to either "other" or dissolve in a single block as per political or ideological needs. Here BBC forgets or absorbs Jamaica also in Asia because its as convenient as hiding Pakistan in "South Asia".
Rascality of media's language construction itself shows up in how they never ever use "British/French-American" or any of the western European as prefix to American, but "Irish/Italian/Hispanic/Asian" freely -implying the false narrative that somehow "west Europeans" are natives.
What is insidious in Harris's construction as "Asian-American" is that it is culturally too diverse to be meaningful as an identity, and ignoring Harris's own distance from the cultures of "Asia" and proximity to US -implying a "racial other" who needs an additional qualifier..
Ideas we don't like should be fought with ideas, words challenged with words, falsities with facts: banishing voices is an acknowledgment that our ideas, words, facts are weaker than our opponent's, and its the first step in a long journey towards eventual defeat.
physically silencing those one hates is typical of totalitarianism, and very characteristic of both Fascists and Communists. Both are totally intolerant of contrary voices, and seek at their earliest to physically silence them, showing how insecure they are in their own beliefs.
all this talk of "moderating content" becomes totally hypocritical - when the very definition of "hate" is totally selective and arbitrary, a matter of arbitrary labeling without justification of the selectivity or honestly acknowledging the underlying preference ordering.
Parliament clearings in history hv only succeeded with military backing - frm Cromwell, to Napoleon to Lenin. Some of them profoundly strengthening the country in the long run, long after the cleaners themselves wr cleaned. Not sure why US one was attempted without preparation.
if antifa/BLM were all spontaneous and had no investment/careful prep because they were massive eruptions of grievances - then the "capitol" takeover has to be spontaneous too : there can't be partisan preference on logic. And its immaturity shows all the more it was unplanned.
The lib/dem (I dont see them as "Left" - they are just the non-"right" faction of the same wealthy, networked elite, often only playacting as socialists while sitting over or having given right to tap into massive wealth) wont get far on the economy, on "race", on pandemic.
Indian academic history construction has actually been a very European academic history construction -sharing a common drive to focus on and coopt those parts of non-European history that can be stretched to fit European political, religious goals. All that doesnt fit is trashed.
European history making is obsessed with ancient Egypt for example, but it obsesses more on Amenhotep IV because they hope to put him in an essentially medieval post-Roman imperial imperialist religious frame of continuity with future Abrahamic trajectory to Christianity.
Modern Europe absolutely excludes anything on the African continent as its own - it can at best be a "colony" of inferior subjects, but never one of its own: one of the reasons Europe never took root in colonies where it cdnt effectively exterminate the natives.
This is a blatant subversion of the sovereignty of people in being the final decision maker over its relationship with a state form the people are acknowledged to have created in the first place. The "basic structure" is a self-contradictory proposition.
Lets start with the implied theory of "original doctrine" - a la Abrahamic revelation. The claim of "basic structure" relies on the interpretation by a small group of individuals who are not answerable to the people - of an earlier document, to reconstruct an "orginal doctrine".
The very legitimacy claim for this "original doctrine" relies on legitimacy and primacy of whatever was done at a past historical point and rigid unchangeability of whatever supposedly was formulated at that past historical point.