Latest news with #Sreenivasan
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
PK Sreenivasan's Midnight Knock is an ode to newsrooms of a bygone era
One of the punchiest scenes in PK Sreenivasan's Midnight Knock comes early, when a young political science graduate walks into a newsroom on the advice of his college teacher and asks the editor for a job. The editor is a close friend of the teacher, who writes a column for the newspaper, and encourages the graduate to write stories for young people in Kerala — nobody gets what a real revolution is like, fumes the editor, and young people only romanticise it these days. What he wants from this new employee is real stories about the nitty-gritties of a political movement, all the heady ambition, daily sacrifices and moral conflicts involved. He wants particular attention paid to Communist and Naxalite figures from the past like Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal and Arikkad Varghese. The romance is real. Newsrooms today struggle to pull strings, enter guarded territories, conduct interviews and publish stories that matter. Reading Sreenivasan's thinly fictionalised account of the 1975-1977 Emergency years, is a breath of fresh air, particularly because of the newsroom's attempts to resist censorship. Indignance is often the first step to revolution. Sreenivasan draws from his time as a reporter to reflect on the many figures — activists, journalists, academics like Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh — who were assassinated in their pursuit for justice. The book is framed as a letter to a friend and mourns the romantics, revolutionaries and idealists in university classrooms, bureaucratic corridors and, of course, chattering newsrooms, who have been claimed by the system, either due to age-induced complacency or fear-induced sycophancy. The narrator's attempts to challenge that inertia, perhaps in the reader herself, is inspiring, even if it reads propagandist at times. The narrator, his teacher and editor often talk like they're reciting textbooks but if they're the only kind of characters that get the privilege of speech, it can get a bit exhausting. LK Advani famously said of the Emergency's censorship policies, 'The media was asked to bend, but it chose to crawl,' and Karl Marx supplied, a century earlier, 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' What runs through this book is a cautious hope that this farce will shortly breathe its last.
The Hindu
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
‘Criticising BJP on caste census when Congress, DMK have not conducted it amounts to intellectual dishonesty'
Criticising Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK leader M.K. Stalin and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for using the issue of caste census as a political tool, BJP State general secretary Raama Sreenivasan asked why the Congress did not conduct it when it was in power at the Centre. In a press meet held in Madurai on Saturday, Mr. Sreenivasan said the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs had decided to include caste enumeration in the upcoming general census. The Congress and the DMK had been using caste census as a political tool. The Congress had ruled at the Centre for many years and the DMK had been a part of the alliance, but they did not conduct caste census. Merely criticising the BJP which had taken the steps towards conducting it amounted to intellectual dishonesty, he said. The census was a Union subject. It should have been conducted in 2021. However, due COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, it was not conducted. It would give clarity and scientific data, he said. Two methods were adopted in conducting the census: one was survey method and the other enumeration method. Enumeration method was foolproof as data would be collected from each household. The Congress had followed the survey method in Telangana and Karnataka. However, there were errors, he said, adding that even in Bihar this method had failed. The BJP-led Central government would follow the enumeration method as it was foolproof, and would be combined with the general census, he said. To a query on whether the TVK and the NTK would also be a part of the AIADMK-BJP alliance, Mr. Sreenivasan said so far there was no such move. Alliance was not an ideological marriage, but an arithmetical convenience. It was the BJP's approach that every single vote against the DMK should not be diverted. Anyone against the DMK was welcome, he said.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Texas House preparing for long budget session
AUSTIN (Nexstar) — On Wednesday morning, Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, called for a motion to vacate Texas Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows from his seat. 'He has chosen to take this body in a hard left direction, where we are growing government, we are increasing spending — and yes that will increase taxes,' Harrison said. While his effort fell short by a final 141-2 margin (only Rep. David Lowe, R-Tarrant County, joined in support), the motion could be a preview of a long night for the Texas House on Thursday, as they discuss the 2026-27 budget. As it stands, Senate Bill 1 (the budget bill) is 1,015 pages and could easily grow throughout Thursday. As of Wednesday afternoon, 393 amendments to the bill were pre-filed, and many more could be proposed throughout the proceedings. 'The members will be spending a lot of these amendments and debating the merits of it through the day,' Rahul Sreenivasan, Director of Government Performance and Fiscal Policy with Texas 2036, said. 'Members are prepared for a long day, historically, they've gone late into the night.' The appropriations bill (and supplemental appropriations bill) fund virtually the entire Texas government, giving all lawmakers a vested interest in how the money is divided. 'The biggest things to me (in this budget) are the money that is contemplated for water infrastructure funding. You have a lot of money. You have additional money being contemplated to invest in university research funding,' Sreenivasan said. 'There's more money contemplated for flood mitigation funding. There's more money contemplated for wildfire response, and that's also in the supplemental bill.' In previous years, a tight budget could make the budget contentious. However, Sreenivasan said the state's nearly $24 billion surplus could ease lawmakers' minds. 'In years where you had tighter revenue cycles, the discussion was more around cuts, whereas this time, you have more revenue available to meet a lot of the state's needs, so you don't have as many legislators worried about key priorities being cut deeply,' he said. On Wednesday morning, the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus met in front of the now-shuttered Pease Elementary School to discuss their displeasure for the budget and the $1 billion earmarked towards starting an education savings account (ESA) program. ESAs would allow parents to use state funds to help pay for private school education. 'I'm here along with my colleagues who call on every Democrat and every Republican to vote against the house appropriations bill, because it is a continued assault on public education in Texas,' State Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, said. 'It contains $1 billion for a voucher scheme when the Republican Legislative Budget Board admits 80% of it will go to pay for wealthy people whose kids are already in private school. We can't continue to defund public education in a state that is already 47th in the nation in funding for our public schools.' Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, said she knows there are Republican representatives who oppose ESAs but said they might not vote with their hearts. 'Ultimately, the governor (Greg Abbott) has put a lot of money into primary races against Republicans who voted with Democrats last session, in support of our neighborhood schools and against taxpayer funded vouchers,' Hinojosa said. 'There's a lot of fear about that.' Hinajosa — who has a proposed amendment to stop any programs enacted by the 89th Legislature if they make the Teacher Retirement System actuarily unsound — said that regardless of the outcome tomorrow, she's going to fight to the end against ESAs. 'This is a major battle in the war to save our neighborhood schools,' she said. 'To say it's the last stand is not something I'm comfortable with, because I don't ever give up.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CBC
19-02-2025
- Politics
- CBC
CBSA complaints commission still not up and running
A new independent commission tasked with monitoring, for the very first time, the activities of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has still not been established, almost four months after the adoption of legislation. The law establishing the new Public Complaints and Review Commission for CBSA and the RCMP was adopted on Oct. 31, 2024, after years of lobbying by numerous groups and human rights experts. The new law builds on the existing RCMP watchdog who is given the additional responsibility of handling public complaints about the CBSA. However, the existing RCMP commission has been without a chairperson since the departure of Michelaine Lahaie on Jan. 1. When her term ended, the government did not reappoint her nor replace her. Public Safety Canada would not say when a new chairperson will be appointed. Public Safety Canada acknowledged that the new commission for both CBSA and RCMP is not up and running but said it is currently working on implementing it "in a timely manner," but without providing a precise timetable. "It was already important and urgent. But now it's much more urgent with the increase in surveillance at the border," says Tim McSorley, national co-ordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. Worry about migrants In the meantime, the federal government has quickly invested $1.3 billion to intercept, for instance, migrants trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border — an operation aimed at appeasing U.S. President Donald Trump. "Black Hawk helicopters, mobile surveillance towers, mobilization of personnel, but not a whisper about the creation of this oversight mechanism to ensure that these increased powers of enforcement come with increased responsibility and accountability", says Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. Sreenivasan and McSorley both fear that migrants, in particular, will pay the price. McSorley said he was particularly saddened by recent photos of migrants taken by thermal imaging systems deployed at the border. The government can't just invest in surveillance technology, he says. It must also protect peoples' rights to seek asylum. In the past, the border agency has been singled out for its treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society, recalls Sreenivasan. She cites for example migrants "who have been held in detention in atrocious conditions, deaths in detention, children separated from their family." "We're very concerned with the deafening silence regarding the creation of the new commission," said Sreenivasan. Public Safety Minister David McGuinty, who has been making multiple announcements on border security, declined CBC/Radio-Canada's request for an interview. CBSA is the only major law enforcement agency with no external oversight mechanism. Complaints from travellers, migrants or other members of the public are presently dealt with internally. In addition to handling public complaints, the new commission will be able to conduct investigations into systemic problems within the CBSA and the RCMP.
