AUTHOR

Soumitra Ghosh

Researcher, social activist, and documentary filmmaker. A long-time activist in environmental and forest rights movements. Has been working for the rights of forest-dwelling and Adivasi communities for more than two decades.

4 stories

News · 18 Sep 2026

Fascism, Democracy and the Long Oppositional Struggle: Part-2

Democracy has to become a habit. The politics of opposition must not merely say different things. It must learn to live differently. A politics of demands is necessary, but if every demand ends at the door of a benevolent state, people remain recipients. Because in the end, the strongest barricade against fascism is not another strong state; it is a strong, oppositional society.

News · 17 Sep 2026

Never Just About Rights: 20 years of The Forest Rights Act (FRA) : Part-2

None of this is an argument against the Forest Rights Act. Quite the opposite. It remains, perhaps, the most democratic forest legislation independent India has enacted. Without it, millions of people would be far more vulnerable to eviction and administrative violence. It gave political and legal force to claims the forest bureaucracy had denied for generations and opened doors that had previously been closed.

News · 10 Sep 2026

Fascism, Democracy and the Long Oppositional Struggle: Part-1

In social movements, we need to distinguish between organisation and organising. An organisation may be a party, union, committee, NGO or federation. It has a name, an office, and positions. Organising is different. It is the slow work of bringing people together so they can think collectively about their own lives, learn to decide and struggle together, learn to trust one another. It is the work of developing their own social power while resisting the power above them.

News · 04 Sep 2026

Never Just About Rights: 20 years of The Forest Rights Act (FRA) : Part-1

Forest rights, its preamble said, had not been properly recorded during either the colonial period or independent India, resulting in a “historical injustice”. The struggle that produced the law was therefore never simply a demand for land titles. It challenged a system of forest governance built during colonial rule and retained, remarkably intact, long after the British left.