Raghu Karnad awarded prestigious Windham-Campbell literary prize
New Delhi: Raghu Karnad, The Wire‘s consulting editor and former bureau chief, on Thursday received the Windham-Campbell prize at Yale University in the US for his book Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War.
On receiving the prize, Karnad said he wrote the book without any certainty that it would even find a publisher outside of India. “To have it recognized like this—and placed in the company of others that were my inspirations—feels less like an achievement than a fantastical dream,” he said. He received the non-fiction category prize for “combining forensic archival research with imaginative fire and unsettling national and colonial histories” in his book.
The book narrates a lost chapter in Indian history through the lives of five young people and was the end result of an essay written in 2012 on the living traces of the Second World War in India’s northeast.
He received also received the prize money of $165,000 at the official ceremony held at the Yale University Art Gallery from the university’s president Peter Salovey.
courtesy: thewire.in
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.
Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.
He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.
Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.
He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.
Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.
He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.
