South Asia Citizens Web

The public’s sympathetic reaction towards Ramar Pillai and against scientific institutions is, on the one hand, a telling commentary on the remarkable conservatism and establishmentarianism of organised science and, on the other, the vulnerability of the secularism project in India.

Seven Judge Constitutional Bench looking at the crucial issue of Section 123(3) of the Representation of People’s Act which is-at election time-the section of the law to create a wall of separation between Religion and Politics and enforce and ensure the Constitutional Mandate of Secularism. One of the aspects of the Reference being heard is that of the wrong interpretation in our view that an appeal to Hindutva is not an appeal to religion.

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