South Asia Citizens Web

India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar recently made an irresponsible statement on 16th of August, when he said that "Going to Pakistan is the same as going to hell." Kannada actor turned politician Ramya, who is also an ex-MP from Congress, referred to Parrikar’s statement when sharing her experience of recently having visited Pakistan to attend a SAARC Young Parliamentarians Conference in Islamabad. She said "Pakistan is not hell. People are just like us. They treated us very well". As a result of this statement, a sedition case has been filed against her under Section 124A of the IPC by K. Vittal Gowda, a Coorg-based advocate. The matter is posted for hearing on August 27th.

The people of Kashmir have tried, time and again, to translate themselves from passive recipients of violence, legitimated by legislations of the physically and psychologically removed parliaments of India and Pakistan, into subjects who recognize that they can exercise agency and take control of their destinies. They march forward with a refusal to allow history to be imposed on them, and attempt to take charge of their own social and political destinies. The confluence of religious nationalism, secular nationalism and ethnic nationalism create the complexity of the Kashmir issue.

Author Ishtiaq Ahmed shares the perspective of the victims as well as perpetrators of the blood-bath surrounding the division of the subcontinent.

In the Hindutva historiographical format Bhaarata, i.e., India, is timeless: the first man was born here; its people were the authors of the first human civilisation, the Vedic, which is the same as the Indus-Saraswati; they had reached the highest peak of achievement in both the arts and the sciences; and they were were conscious of belonging to the Indian nation, which has existed eternally. Views such as these are churned out of the cultural nationalist mill day in and day out and are peddled to the credulous, who accept them as a matter of faith. But evidence shows that India as a country evolved over a long period, and that the formation of its identity was linked with the changing perceptions of the people who migrated into the subcontinent at different times.

An interactive project exploring stories from 1947