South Asia Citizens Web

Communalism has wreaked havoc in Lanka. It is embedded in our prejudices and our backwardness. The Sri Lankan political establishment’s complicity in violence against a minority is a scandal that would impede us for years to come, particularly in view of the lack of will to do away with impunity and hold the armed forces to account. Equally culpable are the Tamil leaders who have inflamed passions where a little sympathy and restraint could have cooled them and hindered communalism putting down institutional roots.

More than 50 years after the arbitrary killing, torture and imprisonment of more than a million communists and their sympathisers in Indonesia, the government has for the first time hosted a two-day national symposium on the 1965-66 violence.

The aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir point the way toward a workable democratic pluralism in the state – where the reigning principle is discussion leading to free elections, not autocratic decision-making either by elected legislators or separatists.

this whole idea that women must conform to certain rules of dress and conduct — rules laid down by men — is so out of date that it is almost laughable. Yet it is relentlessly propagated — by families, by academic institutions, and often, by our astonishingly regressive politicians.

In her Pohela Boishakh address after Nazimuddin’s murder, the same prime minister who had so passionately showed solidarity with Rajib, secularism, and the oppressed secularists, chose to be on the wrong side of history.