The Sensible Arya

  When Bhagat Singh was invited by Joseph Stalin A lesser-known event from the annals of the Indian revolutionary movement is the “invitation” that was sent to Bhagat Singh by the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. This invite could not reach Singh, so we can only speculate about what might have happened if it had been received and accepted. There is no doubt that had it all gone as planned, it had the potential to change the course of our freedom struggle. It was Shaukat Usmani  who connected Bhagat Singh and Stalin. He was  one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India established in Tashkent in 1920. Usmani was sent to India by MN Roy to establish contact with the Indian nationalists. He came in contact with the revolutionaries through Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, the famous editor of the Hindi daily, Pratap, which was published from Kanpur in 1920s. Bhagat Singh worked as a sub-editor at Pratap. He even reviewed Usmani’s political-cum-travel memoir, Peshawar to ...

Rooftop Koreans: An example advocating for the importance of citizen ownership of firearms   Rooftop Koreans or Roof Koreans refer to the Korean American business owners and residents  who armed themselves and took to the rooftops of local businesses to defend themselves  during the 1992 Los Angeles riots .  The unrest in urban areas was sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King and resulted in rioting, and looting, along with widespread violence and arson throughout the city. For years, there had been tensions between the Los Angeles Korean community and the African American communities, including the killing of Latasha Harlins, an African-American teenager who was controversially fatally shot by a Korean-American convenience store owner who received no jail time. Following the Rodney King verdict, Los Angeles police were unable to provide protection to many affected areas due to the overwhelming scale of t...

A society progresses when it reliably rewards the good and restrains the bad. Indian political thought has a precise name for what happens when it fails to do either: Matsya-Nyaya, the law of the fish, where the strong devour the weak in the absence of any restraining order. Kautilya's Arthashastra treats Dand-Niti — the disciplined, impartial exercise of state power to punish wrongdoing — as the mechanism that keeps a society from sliding into exactly that condition. The question worth asking about India today isn't whether this principle is sound. It's whether the specific institution currently tasked with delivering it — a justice system built almost entirely around the judgment of a single, powerful individual — is actually built to succeed at the job. The Structural Problem With a Single Judge India's courts, from magistrate to High Court, generally concentrate final factual and legal judgment in one person, or a very small bench. This isn't merely a procedu...

How BJP use Waqf board to fuel its politics of hate despite Waqf board being a defacto government body?   Recently, I have been seeing many posts and discussions against the Waqf Board and its alleged illegal and immoral occupation of public and private property. However, the problem with many of these posts is that they deliberately ignore or hide key facts about the Waqf Board. The Waqf Board is a government body created through an Act passed by the Parliament of India. The government has the authority to suspend its functioning or correct its decisions if they are found to be against its principles. The Central Waqf Council operates under the Union Government, and its functioning is subject to government oversight. According to the Waqf Act, 1995, the Union Minister in charge of the Central Waqf Council has the power to frame rules regarding its functioning, including matters related to tenure, salaries of members, and control over Waqf funds (Section 12(1)). The Council can als...