South Asia Citizens Web

October 26 was a Friday. Although I am not a superstitious person, I look back at that rainy, gloomy Friday as the day I felt personally betrayed too. I can no longer think of Mr. Maithripala Sirisena as a symbol of political hope for the citizens of this country, and particularly for the younger generation. His actions that Friday marked a shockingly tragic end to the political hope and promise he had epitomized since November 21, 2014.

Subsequent to the accession of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian dominion in 1947, while the Indian subcontinent was reeling from the mayhem of the country’s partition, women’s organizations attempted to contribute peace-building work at the local and regional levels. Have Kashmiri women signified a reconciliatory presence and been harbingers of peace? Does the insurgent movement in Kashmir stress women’s political empowerment and address the protracted crisis for security and legitimacy?

Fojo Media Institute report describes and analyses how online propaganda against journalists across the world

Today in India, 71% of men own mobile phones, but only 38% of women do.

Many years ago a similar Sath was held in which the adivasi fishers had decided to assert their right to fish freely. Then the contractors and the state wielded the threat of a violent assertion of legal right and so the fishers caught fish only to release it back into the river, disarming the State functionaries and symbolic of their non-violent approach to struggle. This year, the Sath culminated in a yatra and a manooti, a pilgrimage and a pledge, to the river, and then they fished.