South Asia Citizens Web

As the last of the British troops - the Somerset Light Infantry - left India in 1948, Indians and Pakistanis were still to understand the true meaning of "Independence". The border that split the country three ways was sketched on a map by Sir Cyril Radcliff during his very first trip to India in July 1947, a month before Independence. A whole civilisation which was to be eternally conjoined by the name of the Indus river, now lay divided into two countries.

On Sept. 2, Buddhist villagers and Myanmar troops killed 10 Rohingya men in Myanmar’s restive Rakhine state. Reuters uncovered the massacre and has pieced together how it unfolded. During the reporting of this article, two Reuters journalists were arrested by Myanmar police.

In the last few decades hundreds of mansions have sprung up in villages throughout Pakistan’s Punjab. We follow three local men who decided to migrate to Oslo where they have worked, got married, and had children – for a better life. But all three have realised their dream on building a mansion on what they consider their real home, and with time, have built mansions to show how far they have come in their lives – but with every mansion built comes heartache.

Partition-induced violence and patterns of migration had unforeseen fallouts. Diversity being the leitmotif of Indian identity, citizenship had to be unencumbered of ethnicity or claims of indigeneity – but then majoritarian impulses could not be expelled altogether. The rules were clear, and apparently non-partisan. Immigrants who came to India prior to the promulgation of the Constitution on January 26, 1950, were all welcome with open arms.

In the late eighties AIDS scare had gripped the country. ABVA (AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan/ AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement) came into existence in 1988-1989 though it was formally christened later as more members joined the group.