AS the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) ramp up their murderous attacks on Pakistani soldiers, ISI officers, police, and ordinary citizens, the men who run Pakistan’s security establishment are trotting out the usual bluff and bluster.
AS the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) ramp up their murderous attacks on Pakistani soldiers, ISI officers, police, and ordinary citizens, the men who run Pakistan’s security establishment are trotting out the usual bluff and bluster.
The South Asia Forum for Freedom of Religion or Belief (SAFFORB) strongly condemns violence against the Christian residents of numerous villages of Narayanpur and Kondagaon districts in the state of Chhattisgarh. There is an organised campaign to forcibly convert Christian Adivasis to Hindu religion. This campaign escalated from 9th December 2022. By 18th December 2022, there were a series of attacks in about 18 villages in Narayanpur district and 15 villages in Kondagaon district displacing about a thousand Christian Adivasis from their villages. Those displaced were told to give up their Christian faith and convert to Hindu religion, failing which they were ordered to leave the village or face dire consequences, including death.
History, the cynic might conclude, has been reduced to putty in the hands of the Indian politician. Thus, the Union home minister can thunder, without blinking an eye, that none can stop the current regime from rewriting history to ‘correct’, what the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Hindutva eco-system crows are, ‘imbalances’. A precedent of this revisionism could have been the decision by Rajasthan — the BJP was in power in the state then — to brazenly declare in school text books that Rana Pratap, and not Akbar, had won the Battle of Haldighati. This abracadabra is not without a purpose. The distortion of history and, increasingly, historiography is aimed to shift the ideological moorings of Indian civilisation, from an inclusive, pluralist entity to that of one with a pronounced majoritarian character.
We were to take out a padyatra during 24-27 December, 2022 from Varanasi to Manduri, Azamgarh in support of a farmers’ movement going on at Manduri since 13 October against a proposed international airport which would involve taking over of 670 acres of land belonging to 8 villages uprooting close to ten thousand people. This padyatra was to mark the completion of 75 days of the daily sit-in observed by mainly women at Khiriya Bagh, an open space in Manduri.
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