South Asia Citizens Web

Puri | 24th November 2019: The National Alliance of People’s Movements is holding its 12th national convention as it completes 25 years. Over 1,000 representatives from various people’s movements, organisations, and in individual capacity are participating in the three-day convention. The second day of the convention started with a human chain in a show of strength of people’s movements and groups at Puris’ famous sea beach . . .

Shortly after Narendra Modi’s rise to power, in August 2014, the RSS formed a committee, the Bharatiya Shiksha Niti Aayog, to “Indianise” the education system. It was headed by Dinanath Batra, who had specialised in rewriting Indian history according to the canons of Hindu nationalism. In 2010, he had filed a civil suit to ban Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus, which he felt gave Hinduism a bad image. Batra also pressured the University of Delhi to remove from its syllabus an essay by A K Ramanujan — Three Hundred Ramayanas — that contradicted the Hindu nationalist idea that there was a single version of the epic.

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

Of the 24 documents, the directive on how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017 offers the most detailed discussion of the indoctrination camps — and the clearest illustration of the regimented way the party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.

The Supreme Court’s judgement in the Ayodhya case delivered on 9 November 2019 has caused widespread concern among all those who have the interests of justice and fairness at heart.

We, the undersigned writers, journalists, creative artists, academics, and activists, are writing to join PEN America, English PEN, and PEN International to express our grave concern regarding the Indian government’s recent decision to revoke writer and journalist Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status.