South Asia Citizens Web

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.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi remembers the historian Barun De.

Kailash Vajpeyi: A poet embraces his favourite subject – death
Written by Sumegha Gulati | New Delhi (April 2, 2015) http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/poet-kailash-vajpeyi-embraces-his-favourite-subject-death/
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Trust not the boat but the river by Mrinal Pande (April 3, 2015) http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/trust-not-the-boat-but-the-river/
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Kailash Vajpeyi a poet who fused tradition with modern by Rana Siddiqui Zaman (4 April 2015) (…)

The leading Hindutva outfit, RSS is trying to co-opt Father of the Nation Gandhi (despite the fact that criminals led by the ideology of Hindutva killed him), Sardar Patel (who as first home minister of India banned it in 1948) and now RSS is attempting to co-opt Dr. Ambedkar, the Dalit philosopher and icon. This is being attempted despite of the fact that Dr. Ambedkar renounced Hinduism for its inequality. While discussing the Hindutva politics he wrote: "If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it (…)