South Asia Citizens Web

A paper published in the latest issue of Itihaas, the Hindi journal of the Indian Council for Historical Research, created a minor controversy last week. In the paper, according to media reports, retired Banaras Hindu University Professor Thakur Prasad Verma had claimed that the famous “Dancing Girl” bronze figurine found at Mohenjo-daro is actually an image of Hindu Goddess Parvati. Practically every page of the paper is filled with wild conjectures, feeble evidence, faulty argumentation, circular reasoning, disdain for chronology or scientific method, literal acceptance of mythical texts, scurrilous but unsubstantiated attacks on other historians and convictions based on prior beliefs. The essay is worth reading in its entirety because it demonstrates why most scholars hold Hindutva-style history in such poor regard.
Hasty derivations

The Caravan Conversations launched the journalist Rana Ayyub’s self-published book, "Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up." In 2010, Ayyub, then working for Tehelka magazine, had spent eight months undercover in Gujarat. Posing as a filmmaker, she met bureaucrats and senior police officials in Gujarat who held pivotal positions in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of the sting operation, unpublished so far, form the core of her book. At the launch, Ayyub was in conversation with the Supreme Court lawyer and the former additional solicitor general Indira Jaising, and the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai. Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor at The Caravan, moderated the discussion, the first half of which is here.

At this time there is a genuine fear that the lack of leadership in J & K has created an abyss that has caused an unredeemable political bankruptcy in the State, and regional aspirations continue to be asphyxiated by the politics of the Indian and Pakistani nation-states. I am distressingly aware of the atrocities inevitably inflicted on idealism, particularly by nation-states that, by their nature, do not brook opposition. Structures of governance might change, legal discourse might change but it is armed might that bestows authority on nation-states, giving them the legitimacy to wage wars and to annihilate peoples in the wake of those wars.

Pakistan: Son of assassinated Governor accused of blasphemy for wishing Merry Christmas

Tributes to the Indian environmentalist Anupam Mishra by Ramachandra Guha and by Harsh Mander