South Asia Citizens Web

Postcolonial scholars and right-wing conservatives oppose enlightenment rights, human rights laws, or modernity for Pakistan and offer religious laws and culture as substitutes.

A girl from Pakistan has offered the best diagnostic of the ailing state and her work, Pakistan under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings), takes you into the guts of what has gone wrong. Madiha Afzal is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution Washington DC, an adjunct assistant professor of global policy at Johns Hopkins SAIS and has been a consultant for the World Bank.

Several Women’s groups and women’s rights activists in Sri Lanka expressed concern over an incident in India where an eight-year-old girl Asifa was allegedly gang-raped in a temple at Rasana in the Kathua district of Kashmir and killed by strangulation. Here is the full text of their letter to the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo Taranjit Singh Sandhu (in April 2018)

In 1983 India’s Department of Post issued postal stamps on Marx and Darwin this may not be possible in current times

Dr. Ashok Mitra (1928-2018) is no more. Economist, politician, political & literary author, analyst, columnist, Dr. Mitra, was known to the world in many different contours, that truly reflected most of his life. For the members of the Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace & Democracy (PIPFPD) in both countries, we pride in that we got to see another face of this quintessential intellectual as an advocate of peace, justice, democracy and people to people relations - amidst hostility.