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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Aug 14, 2022

1/8. Was Independence the gift of a few Oxbridge elites? As Gandhi put it, not great men, but ‘the people themselves are the cause’ of revolutions. My book The Last Heroes: Footsoldiers of Indian Freedom (Penguin) out in November, looks at 16 such people.
#IndependenceDay2022

2/8. In the next 5-6 years, there will not be a single person alive who fought for this country’s freedom. Our new generations will never get to meet, see, speak, or listen to India’s freedom fighters. Never directly learn who they were, what they fought for.
#IndependenceDay2022

3/8. The youngest freedom fighter in this book is 92, the oldest 104. Ordinary people who stood up to the British, unsure if they would ever see the freedom they fought for. They never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high office.
#IndependenceDay2022

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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Jun 28, 2022

1/7. Home Minister Amit Shah recently declared that “No one can stop us from writing history anew” (ToI June 11). The outrageous arrest of Teesta Setalvad shows we’re not just rewriting the past. But our contemporary era and present as well.
#TeestaSetalvad #MohammedZubair

2/7. So all we knew about the Gujarat riots was wrong. Especially about who the victims really were and who the villains. A human rights activist who has stood by and fought for the (real) victims for 20 years now pays the price of her ‘audacity.’
#TeestaSetalvad #MohammedZubair

3/7. The efforts of Teesta and her team led to 117 perpetrators of the Gujarat riots of 2002 being handed life sentences by trial courts. Including a former MLA and minister. Perhaps we’ll now see the rewriting of those judgements and sentences.
#TeestaSetalvad #MohammedZubair

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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Apr 12, 2022

1/15. This week marks the 200th anniversary of the great tradition of Indian journalism – the opposite of the petty one that has ruled our media for 30-40 years. Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the newspaper Mirat-ul-Akhbar on April 12, 1822.
#PressFreedom

2/15. He had of course launched the Bengali paper Sambad Kaumudi in November 1821, but it was not his name that appeared as publisher for a while. With Mirat ul Akhbar he explained his political and social views quite explicitly to an educated elite.
#PressFreedom

3/15. Very early in Mirat ul Akhbar (Mirror of News) Ram Mohan Roy wrote a brilliant editorial protesting the death of Pratap Narayan Das who died from a whipping ordered by the Judge of what is now Comilla in Bangladesh, John Hayes.
#PressFreedom

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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Feb 17, 2022

1/8. With the passing of Ramchandra Sripati Lad (underground name ‘Captain Bhau’) on Feb. 5 – India lost one of her greatest freedom fighters. On June 7, 1943, his Toofan Sena squads looted a British Raj train at Shenoli, Maharashtra. Story link at end of thread.
#FreedomFighter

2/8. The money from the Raj payroll was spent on struggling farmers and workers in a year of great hunger. “It is unjust to say we looted anything,” he complained. “What the British had looted from us Indians, we brought a small part of that back to our people.”
#FreedomFighter

3/8. Captain Bhau’s Toofan Sena was the armed wing of the prati sarkar, the underground provisional government that had declared Satara’s secession from the British Raj and which actually held sway across 600 villages or more for three years from 1943 to 1946.
#FreedomFighter

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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Jan 24, 2022

1/8. Another first for India: police in Amravati, Maharashtra are holding 58 camels “in detention.” They also arrested their pastoralist herders – who’ve managed bail – from Kachchh on charges of cruelty to the animals. Story link at end of thread.
#animal #camel #cattle

2/8. The 5 semi-nomadic herders were going to Rabari settlements in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh to deliver camels that communities there had ordered through kin in Kachchh. They’ve been doing this for decades without anyone accusing them of cruelty.
#animal #camel #cattle

3/8. The police acted on a complaint from the Bharatiya Prani Mitra Sangh (BPMS), Hyderabad, whose leader claims the camels were being taken to slaughterhouses in Hyderabad. So the camels are now lodged in a gauraksha kendra (cattle shelter) in Amravati.
#animal #camel #cattle

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P. Sainath

@PSainath_org

Dec 23, 2021

1/7. Tweets paraphrasing my open letter to the Chief Justice of India responding to his lament that “the concept of investigative journalism is unfortunately vanishing from the media canvas.” But how and why did that come to be so. Story link at end of thread.
#CJI #mediafreedom

2/7. For about 30 years, I had argued that the Indian media are politically free but imprisoned by profit. Today, they remain imprisoned by profit, but the few independent voices amongst them are increasingly politically imprisoned. Some under the UAPA.
#CJI #mediafreedom

3/7. I do not see the judiciary stepping in to stop this mayhem, whether on governmental corruption, or the mass retrenchment of journalists, the gutting of labour rights, or the misuse of the PM’s title to raise funds free of any kind of transparent audit.
#CJI #mediafreedom

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