South Asia Citizens Web

WAF Hyderabad is inducting women workers and activists onto its forum to fuse the ideological politics with the energy and skills of the millennial activists towards a stronger overarching women’s protest movement

I am thrilled to have been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2015. I am even more thrilled that the Nobel Committee highlighted the work that my collaborators and I have done on India.

Lynch mobs and assassins are on a rampage across South Asia. Days after a Muslim man was murdered in India, for allegedly eating beef, a Baptist pastor was stabbed in Bangladesh. It isn’t just religious minorities that are under assault. In recent months, bloggers, atheists and rationalist intellectuals have been assassinated.

in the wake of the lynching and murder of Mohammad Akhlaq, Hindu fundamentalists in India utilise a language alien to their own principles to spread their brand of malice and violence — they use the language of democracy. Those who support Hindu fundamentalism mangle the most cherished norms of democratic society — liberty, equality before law, justice — to give even such a horrifying misdeed a democratic veneer.

Rationalist groups in India fight not just superstitions, ‘godmen’, ‘ghosts’, ‘spirits’ or social injustice. As profiles of several across India show, threats are a constant presence.