South Asia Citizens Web

t’s a good time to be a populist. Across the world, populism has made significant strides. Sanctimonious populism coupled with ironclad convictions seems to be the staple diet of contemporary politics. The emergence of right-wing populism, nationalism and anti-Muslim politics is not confined to Europe but is manifest in other regions as well. Likewise, illiberal nationalism is not exclusive to Muslim-majority states but is also evident in India in the form of the chauvinistic Hindutva movement–the Hindu nationalist ideology.

Rapid Action Battalion members were conducting drive in Khulna to rescue Farhad Mazhar as the columnist was traced there this evening hours into he went missing from Dhaka.

Citizens of Mumbai will take out a rally from Kotwal Garden to Chaityabhoomi to protest the series of lynchings and hate crimes that are occurring in this country with nauseating regularity.

The killings are directly linked to government policy. I would hold the government personally responsible for these murders and any reasonable person would. The data journalism website Indiaspend has reported that 97% of lynching murders by gau rakshaks have come after 2014. They are the gift to us of the Modi government and of the state BJP governments (Haryana and Maharashtra in particular but they are not alone) which lit the fuse on gau raksha through legislation and rhetoric on cow slaughter. Almost no violence was happening before this on the matter of cattle, as the data proves.

A brilliant student, Mashal Khan, was brutally murdered by a mob on a university campus in Pakistan earlier in 2017 after he was accused of blasphemy. The killing caused widespread outrage in Pakistan and has even led to calls to change the country’s strict blasphemy laws. Who was Mashal Khan and why was he murdered? Secunder Kermani investigates.