Dear Reader,
In the 12 years since Scroll was launched, India has been attempting to reconstruct the very foundations on which the Republic has been built.
Since 2014, our rulers have taken the bulldozer to the values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity envisaged by the Constitution that came into effect on January 26, 1950. Our liberal democracy is being remodelled as an edifice based on the tremulous pillars of majoritarianism.
Indians are being convinced that democracy rests on the brute superiority of numbers – ignoring the fact that our Constitution guarantees equal rights for all and protects minority communities against discrimination.
The process of re-engineering the framework is fuelled by injustice. At Scroll, we have not only tried to explain the malign impulses that motivate these designs, we have reported on the human cost they have extracted.
We have been on the ground to report on the lynchings of Muslims; the arrests of dissident lawyers, professors and poets in the controversial Bhima-Koregaon case; the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that inserted a religion-based exemption into Indian law; the attacks on Christians and the constraining of choice under the guise of so-called anti-conversion laws; and the abrogation of Constitutional provisions that afforded limited autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir – India’s only Muslim-majority state.
More recently, we have been reporting on the cruel deportations of Bengali-origin Muslims whose citizenship status has been deemed unreliable by the often-arbitrary decisions of foreigners tribunals. We have also written about how the process to “purify” the electoral rolls through a “special intensive revision” could result in the mass disenfranchisement of India’s most vulnerable citizens.
These reporting efforts, as our readers know, do not come cheap. As Scroll marks our 12th anniversary this Republic Day, we ask you to sign up for a subscription and recommend us to others who may be interested in our work.
On our part, we will continue to bear witness, without fear or favour.
Thank you,
Naresh Fernandes
Editor, Scroll
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