South Asia Citizens Web

Professor Romila Thapar is giving the third Nandita Prasad Sahai Memorial Lecture on 5 August in JNU

One of the few women senior counsel in the Bombay High Court, Gayatri Singh is also the co-founder of the Human Rights Law Network. In this interview with Bar & Bench’s Anuj Agrawal, she talks about her journey in law, what got her into trade unions and much more.

On the topic of Hindu-Muslim communal rivalry and the formation of the theocratic Pakistan state in 1947, the history of late colonial India has usually fixated on high-level politics of the late 1940’s and the political intrigue of leaders, officials, and British statesmen. This ’top-down’ perspective has meant that little attention has been paid to the popularity of the two-nation theory among the masses, thereby giving a misleading picture that Pakistan was created by fluke.

The ideological groundings of Sinhala supremacist and chauvinist thinking remain today – perhaps all the stronger and deeper because of (a) the defeat of the LTTE in 2009; (b) the persistent propaganda of the Tamil nationalist lobbies abroad, with many seams of fabrications mixed with fact; and (c) the pressures of a Western cabal posing as the “international community” and driven by a form of secular righteousness that is impervious to the double-standards imprinted on its masthead.

1983 Russian animation film using match sticks on conflict between nations