South Asia Citizens Web

When there is an area of political discussion or a concept that seemingly cannot be discussed it is often useful to start from there, or at the very least to investigate why this is the case. That would seem to be an important way step out of any ‘radical moralism’ – even if holding on to a sense of ethics at the same time. This particular book started coming out of experiences of the anti-globalization or global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. In particular it starts from ideas around employing a diversity of tactics, which was quite useful in terms of bringing together quite different often disparate approaches for common protests and projects. But for me that also raised the question of how one would even go about thinking or working through strategic directions for movement organizing.

We, the members of People’s SAARC met in Kathmandu on 13-14 September 2017 to reaffirm our commitment to human rights, freedom of expression, justice, peace, security, and democracy in the region, for equity for all and to eliminate all forms of discrimination.

No sooner had the celebratory lights of Independence Day been extinguished that Delhi was plunged into the darkness of unprecedented communal violence.

The Dera Sacha Sauda fiasco is a classic example of the state-temple-business nexus and what ensues when the basic social functions of the state are “spiritualised” and contracted out to godmen.

continued intrusion of the military into civilian spaces and everyday lives of the Tamils in the Vanni can be seen in the work of the Civil Security Department (‘CSD’). The CSD was created in 2006 out of the existing National Home Guard Service. It originally employed primarily volunteer personnel in border villages and the Eastern province and was viewed largely as a surveillance network by Tamil communities. A few years after the war ended in 2009, the CSD began entering the Vanni region, but had recast itself as a livelihood provider and tried to convince local populations that joining the CSD was not the equivalent of joining the military