South Asia Citizens Web

People’s SAARC, a regional network of progressive South Asian people’s movements and mass organisations, is deeply dismayed at the cancellation of the 19th South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit which was scheduled to be held in Pakistan in November 2016.

The various communities in the state of J & K – Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmiri Pandits, Dogras and Ladakhis – have tried time and again to form a national consciousness in order to name a cultural alterity through the nation. The construction of “Kashmiriyat,” or a syncretic cultural ethos, by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his comrades involved culling selected cultural fragments from an imagined past that would enfold both the Pandits and the Muslims. But due to the regional sentiments that are so well entrenched in the psyche of the people, this attempt is still in a volatile stage.

Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by anybody non-Hindu

PUDR strongly condemns the burning of the effigies of activists and a journalist by the Chhatissgarh Auxiliary police force across Bastar in a widely publicised ‘offical protest on 24th October. This show of strength by state forces against civilians was the latest and most brazen example of the patronage extended by the government and its systematic fostering of a Police Raj in Bastar. All the public figures whose effigies were burnt- Manish Kunjam, Nandini Sundar, Himanhsu Kumar, Soni Sori, Bela Bhatia and Malini Subramaniam- are members of civil society who have faced violence and intimidation earlier as well for exposing and resisting the ongoing war against the adivasis in Bastar.

We, the signatories of this statement, come from diverse backgrounds including social and natural sciences, engineering, policy advocacy and law, community organisation, journalism and science popularisation, but we all believe that sharing the waters of the Cauvery is not only a political, administrative and technical challenge but requires an alternative vision for the entire river basin and informed public discourse to transform conflict into cooperation.