South Asia Citizens Web

Sinhalese Buddhist extremism has been vehemently condemned for the violence by the United Nations, Western governments, media, academia, and non-governmental organizations and their Sri Lankan counterparts. There is no question that violence by any group against another must be condemned and perpetrators must be held accountable. However, in order to avoid descent into further “religious” violence, it is important to move beyond a simplistic depiction of a majority aggressor and a minority victim and consider the multiple historical and social structural causes of the conflict.

History and mythology both try to explain the past but while history relies on evidence, myths rely on fantasy and must be examined differently, says the scholar

If history is essential to nationalism as has been frequently said, so too is the claim to a national culture frequently curated from this history. The problem arises when selections have to be made as to what goes into the construction of a national culture. At the official level there is a continued use of the colonial terms: majority and minority, derived from figures of those following different religions. Instead of looking for more valid descriptive terms, the configuring of culture as majority and minority cultures, however inept, is reinforced by saying that whereas the majority culture will be prominent, the cultures of the minorities will also figure. What this means is that Indian culture more often is defined centrally by what is projected as Hindu culture, with an addition if required of items associated with those that come from minority communities.

Journalist Ravish Kumar speaks on the recent communal violence in Bihar, asking citizens to stay away from communal propaganda and efforts to incite and divide people

The Cambridge Analytica episode demonstrates that enforcing the substance and spirit of privacy law might be a challenge. However, this pessimism should only get us to stronger regulation. A toothless regulator is far easier to ignore – both at the stage of enforcement but even at the prior stage of compliance.