ABVP Means Campus Violence
On the night of 28th October, ABVP disrupted the UGBM discussion on ICC/GSCASH in JNU and just hours prior was also involved in organising an event that erupted into intoxication, vandalism, harassment and animal cruelty in Ambedkar University Delhi’s Kashmere Gate Campus. In both these campuses ABVP has had a long history of violence and standing as a wall against the cause of gender justice. Again and again events organised by ABVP in AUD have been hotbeds of gender violence and Hooliganism on campus, despite which they get a free hand and support from the administration.

Similarly in JNU as well, it has become a pattern for them to disrupt all democratic procedures by shouting, causing ruckus and raising casteist and communal slogans. When criticised, the ABVP very conveniently takes up the cloak of religion to justify their actions. These incidents are not isolated but a product of the well organised nexus between the ABVP and the Administration where these hooligans are given a free hand to bring disorder, chaos and violence as they want on the campus. In JNU’s UGBM people saw how members of ABVP made Casteist and Islamo-phobic remarks against students and JNUSU Office Bearers.

Just a few days ago, on the evening of 22nd October 2024 in an incident which echoes the same communal and violent attitude ABVP, its members including DUSU candidate BhanuPratap Singh, shouted religious slogans in Jamia Millia Islamia. The bursting of crackers was accompanied by unruly behaviour targeted at Muslim students, especially women. The event was followed by several BJP IT Cell members trolling students with mainstream media’s Islamophobic coverage of the incident putting the blame entirely on the Muslim students and questioning the existence of Jamia as a minority institution
All India Students’Association (AISA)

A Fascist Returns
It is not surprising that Donald J. Trump, an open white supremacist, anti-science lunatic, who ran an election campaign for President dripping with the hatred of women, vicious bloodlust against immigrants and threats of violence against those who disagree, has won the presidency of United States of America for a second time. Trump is an outright fascist and half of the United States voted for a fascist because his opponent Kamala Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an exploitative economic system with expansionist foreign policy that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and current US president Joe Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U S A, is supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people. Israel is a rogue terrorist state, which claims for itself the right to defy international law, even to the point of committing genocide, as it is doing in Palestine and Lebanon right now. And the fact is that Israel could not so easily, and repeatedly, carry out massive crimes against humanity and war crimes, if it weren’t fully backed by the USA. Americans were told to choose between a lunatic racist, woman-hating, all-around fascist Donald Trump and a genocidal war criminal Kamala Harris.
Rudra Sen, Kolkata

Plight of Gottikoya Tribals
ST Panel urges Centre, States to take policy action for Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-displaced Gotti-koyatribals. It is indeed shocking that the displacement should be attributed to LWE violence and no mention of SalwaJudum. 

The situation in Chattisgarh is going back to being terrible. There are fake encounters and arrests. A recent report on the security camps that have come up every 3-5 km suggests how fear psychosis has gripped the entire region. Forests have been wantonly cut and there is no accountability. The government is using the displacement caused by SalwaJudum to deny people their basic land rights/patta rights, on the ground that no survey has been done.

The causes of the displacement are projected as ‘violence between Maoist guerrillas and Indian security forces’, ‘due to Left Wing Extremism.  In truth majority of the Gottikoyas were displaced from Chattisgarh between2005 to 2011. Isn’t it a very great coincidence that the Salwa Judumwas formed in 2005 until the Supreme Court banned it on July 5, 2011? Strangely enough the displacement coincides with the life span of SalwaJudum. The complete blackening out of the reference to SalwaJudum, a state sponsored armed terrorist group given a free hand by the state and its forces under the facade that this is a people initiated defence force which the Supreme Court rubbished, is deliberate. For one thing, Salwa Judum, in reality ‘continues to exist in the form of armed auxiliary forces, District Reserve Groups, and other vigilante groups.’ Is there a connect between this and the displaced not wanting to return to their place of origin?

Gottikoyas were allegedly encroaching on forest land, impacting forest resources and causing “irreparable damage”. How was this discovered? After all whether they had encroached on forest land in Telangana can only be determined when  FRA implementation has been completed for the displaced with reference to  their place of origin in Chattisgarh (who knows whether their community rights extend beyond Chattisgarh into Telangana, after all the states divided their homelands and shared them) and their present place?
Nandini Sundar
Delhi University, Delhi, India

Siege, Starvation and Extermination
Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza are so terrible that the English language and international law seem to lack the vocabulary to encompass and convey the horror.

The World Food Programme mission that reached Beit Hanoun on November 10 “included two trucks carrying life-saving ready-to-eat rations and wheat flour, and one truck carrying bottled water” and was delivered to two shelters. But shortly thereafter, Israeli forces intensely shelled and surrounded the area where the aid was delivered and ordered families to leave. Next morning, Israeli forces attacked a crowd of Palestinians awaiting the arrival of humanitarian aid at a roundabout northwest of Gaza City, killing and injuring dozens .. troops fired shells andbullets toward the group, who hadn’t received aid in around 50 days, forcing them to take cover in a nearby home. “As soon as they reached the building, the Israeli army bombed it. Screams from those still inside the targeted house were heard, but the victims’ cries for help could not be answered, as the area was inaccessible to ambulance and civil defense personnel.” Ramy Abdu, the head of Euro-Med Monitor, said that the world is witnessing ”a comprehensive, systematic genocide. Every moving body in the northern Gaza areas, whether in the North Gaza governorate or Gaza City governorate, is being targeted and killed”. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that Muhammad Alloush, one of its field researchers, lost 24 members of his family in the Jabaliya attack, among them 14 children, the youngest only 5 months old. ”These innocent civilians were killed while they were sleeping and suffering from starvation” .. ”close to 70 percent of those killed in Gaza by strikes, shelling and other hostilities were children and women. The age group most represented in verified fatalities was children from 5 to 9 years old” .. ”The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence” .. Siege, starvation and extermination.

At least 72 Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes on northern Gaza, November 17 2024. Since 5 October, Israel has launched a large-scale ground operation in northern Gaza to allegedly prevent Palestinian resistance group Hamas from regrouping. Palestinians, however, accuse Israel of seeking to occupy the area and forcibly displace its residents. Since then, no humanitarian aid, including food, medicine, and fuel, was allowed into the area, leaving most of the population there on the verge of imminent famine.
S Shankar

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 23, Dec 1 - 7, 2024