Divya Gandhi

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy

Dear Reader,I stay away from poetry. It might be an effect of growing up in Kolkata, where one composes poetry on everything, from cloudy skies to yellow taxi to Gelusil. For the same reason perhaps, poetry stalks me, no matter how much I run away from it. It whispers, nay screams, inside my head at the most inopportune moments, leaving me red-faced. A few days back, some lines from the poetry of Larkin started haunting me.

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy

Brigadier (retd) Basant K. Ponwar, a veteran of the 1971 Bangladesh war, has extensive experience in counter-insurgency operations across India. Having served in Nagaland, Punjab, Tripura, and the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, Ponwar has trained police personnel from 10 Maoist-insurgency-affected States, as well as members of the Border Security Force, Indo Tibetan Border Police, Sashastra Seema Bal, and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), in guerrilla warfare tactics since 2005.

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Amey Tirodkar |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy

On the first day of 2025, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was in Wangeturi, a village in Gadchiroli district that is known for its dense tropical forests covering 70 per cent of its area and for its strong naxal presence. He flagged off a Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation bus that would ply between Wangeturi and remote Gatta via Gardewada, the first bus service on the route.

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy

In the late 1980s, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, leader of the People’s War (PW), dispatched Maoist squads to Khammam, Karimnagar, Warangal, and Adilabad (in present-day Telangana). Driven by Mao Zedong’s belief that “power flows from the barrel of a gun”, the PW waged an armed struggle, extending operations across the Godavari to Gadchiroli in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh’s Bastar (then in Madhya Pradesh), aiming to establish guerrilla safe zones.

2 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy

Bela Bhatia, a Bastar-based lawyer, researcher and writer, has been working for years on issues related to human rights abuses and state repression, particularly in conflict-torn areas. With a postgraduate degree in social work from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, she blends academic rigour with on-the-ground advocacy.