South Asia Citizens Web

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

PUDR condemns the incident of flogging, stripping and parading of seven men belonging to the chamar caste by vigilante gaurakshaks on 11 July 2016 in Mota Samadhiyala village, Una taluka, Gir Somnath District Gujarat, which has brought the Brahmanical character of Hindutva cow politics and the caste character of the state to centre stage.

The Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 on the basis of religion. Bangladesh was born 31 years later, in 1971, on the basis of nationalism, democracy and secularism. Democracy we lost first, in the mid-seventies and then in the early eighties, and are yet to recover it fully. Secularism, which was on a gradual decline, now faces its most severe threat.