Bajrang Dal is a Hindu nationalist militant organisation that forms the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). It is a member of the right-wing Sangh Parivar. The ideology of the organisation is based on Hindutva. It was founded on 1 October 1984 in Uttar Pradesh, and began spreading more in the 2010s throughout India, although its most significant base remains the northern and central portions of the country.
Human rights in India is an issue complicated by the country's large size and population as well as its diverse culture, despite its status as the world's largest sovereign, secular, socialist democratic republic. The Constitution of India provides for fundamental rights, which include freedom of religion. Clauses also provide for freedom of speech, as well as separation of executive and judiciary and freedom of movement within the country and abroad. The country also has an independent judiciary as well as bodies to look into issues of human rights.
Popular Front of India (PFI) is an Islamic political organisation in India, that engages in a radical and exclusivist style of Muslim minority politics. Formed to counter Hindutva groups, it was banned by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on 28 September 2022 for a period of five years.
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is an Indian law aimed at prevention of unlawful activities associations in India. Its main objective was to make powers available for dealing with activities directed against the integrity and sovereignty of India. The most recent amendment of the law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019 has made it possible for the Union Government to designate individuals as terrorists without following any formal judicial process. UAPA is also known as the "Anti-terror law".
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
The Shree Ram Sena, or Shree Ram Sena, is a right-wing Hindutva group founded & headed by Pramod Muthalik. It has received media attention for its acts of moral policing, including the 2009 Mangalore pub attack.
Social Democratic Party of India, popularly known as SDPI, is an radical Islamist, fundamentalist Indian political party founded on 21 June 2009 in New Delhi. It is the political wing of the Islamist organization Popular Front of India (PFI).
The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder, commonly known as the Nirbhaya case, involved a rape and fatal assault that occurred on 16 December 2012 in Munirka, a neighbourhood in South Delhi. The incident took place when Jyoti Singh, a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern, was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured in a private bus in which she was travelling with her male friend, Avnindra Pratap Pandey. There were six others in the bus, including the driver, all of whom raped the woman and beat her friend. She was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi for treatment and transferred to Singapore eleven days after the assault, where she succumbed to her injuries two days later. The incident generated widespread national and international coverage and was widely condemned, both in India and abroad. Subsequently, public protests against the state and central governments for failing to provide adequate security for women took place in New Delhi, where thousands of protesters clashed with security forces. Similar protests took place in major cities throughout the country. Since Indian law does not allow the press to publish a rape victim's name, the victim was widely known as Nirbhaya, meaning "fearless", and her struggle and death became a symbol of women's resistance to rape around the world.
There have been several instances of religious violence against Muslims since the partition of India in 1947, frequently in the form of violent attacks on Muslims by Hindu nationalist mobs that form a pattern of sporadic sectarian violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Over 10,000 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim communal violence since 1950 in 6,933 instances of communal violence between 1954 and 1982.
Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and opinion columnist with The Washington Post. She is author of the investigative book Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.
The Citizenship Amendment Act (Bill) protests, also known as the CAA Protest, CAB Protest or CAA and NRC protests, occurred after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was enacted by the Government of India on 12 December 2019. The move sparked a widespread national and overseas ongoing protests against the act and its associated proposals of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The protests first began in Assam and spread swiftly in other states such as Delhi, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura on 4 December 2019. Protests broke out rapidly across the country, although the concerns of the protesters vary.
The 2020 Delhi riots, or North East Delhi riots, were multiple waves of bloodshed, property destruction, and rioting in North East Delhi, beginning on 23 February 2020 and brought about chiefly by Hindu mobs attacking Muslims. Of the 53 people killed, two-thirds were Muslims who were shot, slashed with repeated blows, or set on fire. The dead also included over a dozen Hindus, who were shot or assaulted. More than a week after the violence had ended, hundreds of wounded were languishing in inadequately staffed medical facilities and corpses were being found in open drains. By mid-March many Muslims had remained missing.
Arfa Khanum Sherwani is an Indian journalist, and the senior editor of The Wire. She is an alumna of Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia. She has received the Red Ink Award and the Chameli Devi Jain Award.
Shalu Nigam is an Indian lawyer, feminist legal scholar, and author. She was the petitioner in the landmark case Shalu Nigam v. Regional Passport Officer, decided on 17 May 2016, which held that passports can be issued without requiring the name of the father.
Editors Guild of India (EGI) is a non-profit organisation of journalists, particularly the Editors, based in India. The organization has declared "objectives of protecting press freedom and for raising the standards of editorial leadership of newspapers and magazines". It was founded in 1978, by Kuldip Nayar. EGI has represented Indian newspapers in communications to the government.
"Sulli Deals" was an open-source app which contained photographs and personal information of some 100 Muslim women online. An FIR was filed by the Delhi Police with National Commission for Women India taking suo moto cognisance of the matter on 8 July 2021. The creator of the app was a BCA Student from Indore, Madhya Pradesh. On 9 January 2022, Thakur, who created the app to "defame" Muslim women, was arrested by the Delhi Police. Thakur was granted bail on 29 March by the court.
Events in the year 2022 in India.
In 2022, Indian news outlet The Wire alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used an application, called Tek Fog, to manipulate social media. The story went viral in India, and drew reactions from opposition politicians.
The 2022 Muhammad remarks row began on 27 May 2022, when Nupur Sharma, a spokeswoman of India's ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made remarks about the Islamic prophet Muhammad in reply to remarks on the Hindu god Shiva, on a Times Now debate on the Gyanvapi Mosque dispute, which sparked controversy. Sharma's comment was in reference to an account from Sahih al-Bukhari that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six-years old, and the marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine. The controversy escalated on 1 June, when Naveen Kumar Jindal, the Delhi BJP media chief, made similar remarks on Twitter. By 4 June, the remarks had been widely shared on social media, and were trending among the top 10 hashtags in all the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Turkey. On the contrary, they were defended by right-wing politicians in Europe, like Geert Wilders, who cited Sharma's right to freedom of speech.
Mohammed Zubair is an Indian journalist, fact-checker and the co-founder of Alt News, an Indian non-profit fact-checking website.
