South Asia Citizens Web

October 8, 2015

Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) strongly condemns Shiv Sena for using the threat of violence which led to the cancellation of performance of Ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali.

They believe their efforts are more about social justice than philanthropy, but these young lawyer collectives are giving back to society by choosing to represent those with little or no legal recourse

Ban on books, films, plays and artistic works on the pretext of “hurting religious sentiments” of a particular community have become a fad and the Church should restrain from subscribing to this trend.

When litterateurs decide to return their awards, as writer Nayantara Sahgal and poet Ashok Vajpeyi have chosen to do, their action reveals a state of agitation among India’s intelligentsia. By returning the prestigious awards, the authors have strongly conveyed their disquiet over the recent spate of violence leveraged by various groups to enforce cultural norms, supposedly identified with the Hindutva ideology.

It is, of course, a fallacy that there is a hierarchy of agreeable and less agreeable Hindutva ideologues. As such, it could be a Brahminical myth that Modi of a lower caste is by some yardstick worse than Vajpayee in his communalism. Modi is coarse. Vajpayee was urbane. Little else sets them apart. While Mohammed Akhlaq’s recent lynching by a mob of cow worshippers has set off finger-pointing at Modi, and rightly so, it was during Vajpayee’s rule that Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two small sons were roasted alive in their jeep by a Hindutva mob in Orissa.