Excavation
Lila Azam Zanganeh interviews Amitav Ghosh May 2011
The author Amitav Ghosh discusses the link between anthropology and writing, The New Yorker’s edit of his essay on the Iraq war, and John Updike’s worst book.
Excavation
Lila Azam Zanganeh interviews Amitav Ghosh May 2011
The author Amitav Ghosh discusses the link between anthropology and writing, The New Yorker’s edit of his essay on the Iraq war, and John Updike’s worst book.
Mr. Gautam Navlakha, Convener, International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK) and Editorial Consultant, Economic and Political Weekly, was stopped at Srinagar airport on his arrival from New Delhi, and asked to go back. Officials invoked Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. By the time the authorities finalized their decision regarding his return, there were no remaining flights out of Srinagar. Mr. Navlakha is being detained and taken to an undisclosed location until May 29, when he will be allowed to return home.
Classifying the Taliban between Pakistani and Afghan or that of moderate, innocent and hardliner will only be followed by confusion and disappointment.
Anuradha M. Chenoy and Kamal A. Mitra Chenoy, Maoist and Other Armed Conflicts, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2011. This is a high impact low fuss book. Within its covers the authors provide a remarkably comprehensive and lucidly written survey of the three geographical zones where armed conflicts are currently taking place within India – J& K, the Northeast trouble spots of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Bodoland, and the Maoist resistance in the central forested regions of the country – one sixth of the country’s area in all. By the objective standards established by the Geneva Conventions these are all ‘armed conflicts’ but are never described as such by the Indian government. The preferred labels are insurgency, militancy, terrorism, etc., because otherwise New Delhi could be held much more strongly to account for its behavioural disregard for the norms and rules of warfare as laid down in these Conventions. That would not do any good to the image that elite India and the state that succours this elite would like to present to the world — of an India that is not only rising but which proudly declares itself as the largest and enduringly vibrant of democracies!
Given that 30,000 nuclear weapons failed to save the Soviet Union from decay, defeat and collapse, could the Bomb really have saved Pakistan in 1971? Can it do so now?
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