'Protests have forced government on the backfoot'
January 29, 2020  11:55
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Dr Suvrat Raju is a theoretical physicist on the faculty of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru. Dr Raju, who has a PhD from Harvard, was one of the two winners of the 2019 ICTP Prize in honour of Nobel Laureate Dr Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for new insights into the holographic description of black hole interiors and for shedding new light on the long-standing black-hole information paradox.


Dr Raju is among the nearly 2,000 scientists and science students who signed a letter against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. He was also among the prominent Indian scientists, researchers and academicians from premier institutions such as IITs and IISc who petitioned the government to end the communication shutdown in Kashmir.


"The scale of the protests is remarkable. Even students who were apolitical or may have been previously sympathetic to the government have changed their perspectives. This has changed the discourse and brought back a discussion of many progressive ideas that had taken a backseat, including ideas of secularism, the freedom of speech, and the role of dissent in democracy," Dr Raju tells Rediff.com's Archana Masih.


Read the interview here. 
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