South Asia Citizens Web

The ummah is at war with itself. What other way is there to describe the brutal bloodletting by Muslims of Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, and, of course, Pakistan.

The rise of Hindutva, particularly since the eighties, is paralleled by strenuous contemporaneous attempts by writers like Ayesha Jalal and H.M. Seervai to present a sanitized version of the politics of M.A. Jinnah. Such accounts have had an appreciable circulation. Some of the conceptual questions arising on the above basis and having implications for the notion of ‘minority’ and ‘minority politics’ are dealt with in this paper.

These lynchings are a form of communal violence that is different from what we have seen before. Firstly, they are apparently decentralised. Earlier, organised acts of mass violence were repetitive in character and there was a pattern, e.g. processions were attacked or the violence was timed with public festivals.

Five days after a protest by domestic workers at the Mahagun Moderne residential society in Sector 78 in Noida [near New Delhi]; the Noida Authority on Monday [17 July 2017] demolished a settlement of workers shanties referred to as the ’bangladeshi colony’ in the area where most of the workers lived. The residents welfare association of the upper class noida colony issued a notice saying ‘keep Bangladeshis out’. India’s infamous minister of culture (well known for his murky role in honouring the Akhlaque murder accused in Dadri near Delhi) came out in support of the Noida family accused of assaulting a domestic worker and soon after the Noida local authorities went ahead razed to the ground the workers settlement. Influential people who live in gated colonies call the shots and use and abuse power to show the poor their place in a hugely unequal India

Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving-men would have been a disillusioned lot now, hunting not for news but busy correcting fake news, lamenting how the sacred 5Ws and one H that ran through the veins of all news have been sacrificed at the altar of hate politics. Now, news is created without them. Its practitioners are not the professional journalists but a fast-growing tribe of politicians and peddlers of hate, mostly among the right-wing establishment who, with a fake Twitter handle, use altered news, pictures and videos to alter the truth.