South Asia Citizens Web

Le Premier ministre de l’Inde, Narendra Modi, entame aujourd’hui, le mardi 14 avril, une visite officielle de trois jours au Canada. Le Premier ministre Stephen Harper participera aux événements prévus dans les trois villes figurant sur l’itinéraire de M. Modi – Ottawa, Toronto et Vancouver -, ce qui souligne la grande importance que le Canada accorde à cette visite.

Many are of the opinion that these strange university protests in Jamia and Jadavpur, which entail putting up sanitary products in public spaces, are not in good taste. But why should they be? If menfolk happened to have menstrual cycles instead of women, this would hardly have occasioned social shame for them. Instead, they would have celebrated their stains, declared the blood sacred and exhibited with considerable pride the sanitary pads that bore the signs of their power.

New Delhi, 13 April 2015 - Three witness-survivors of the 7 April 2015 extra-judicial killing by the Andhra Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) came forward and recorded their statements at the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) this morning. The survivors were accompanied by Henri Tiphagne of the Peoples’ Watch and Supreme Court advocate Vrinda Grover. The statements of the witnesses challenge the claim of "self defence" of the STF and the AP government.

In my view neither Akbar nor Bahadur Shah Zafar who opposed cow slaughter cared for India’s poor. The newly decorated Bharat Ratna Atal Behari Vajpayee may have stayed for all of 13 days as prime minister in 1996, but he promptly promised a ban on cow slaughter. If the Mughals translated the Upanishads or Mahabharat or Ramayan into Persian they did so to stay in their comfort zone with India’s Hindu elite. They criminalised beef-eating without fixing a politically correct food menu for India’s poor who include Muslims and Christians. Both communities remain in the cross hairs of Hindutva’s communal agenda.

The veteran leftist Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (1925 to 2015) died on March 23, 2015. Her departure closes the chapter on pre-partition erstwhile Lahore-based Communist and pro-Communist intellectuals and activists.