South Asia Citizens Web

On March 10, the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) awarded the 2016 Leontief Prize to Diane Elson and Amit Bhaduri for their work to improve our economic understandings of development, power, gender, and human rights.

Marriage has curtailed women’s freedom for centuries

Can there be two type of Justice delivery system in the same country? This question came to one’s mind with the U turn taken by NIA in the cases related to terror acts in which many Hindu names were involved. Now the NIA in a fresh charge sheet (May 13, 2016) has dropped the charges against Pragya Singh Thakur, has lightened the ones against Col Purohit and others.

On Friday [27 May 2016], The Caravan Conversations launched the journalist Rana Ayyub’s self-published book, "Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up." In 2010, Ayyub, then working for Tehelka magazine, had spent eight months undercover in Gujarat. Posing as a filmmaker, she met bureaucrats and senior police officials in Gujarat who held pivotal positions in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of the sting operation, unpublished so far, form the core of her book. At the launch, Ayyub was in conversation with the Supreme Court lawyer and the former additional solicitor general Indira Jaising, and the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai. Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor at The Caravan, moderated the discussion, the first half of which is here.

The past few years have seen an alarming increase in violent attacks on the democratic rights of ordinary people all over South Asia. Fundamentalist groups are attacking and/or killing people whom they perceive to be challenging their beliefs, or ’hurting their sentiments’.