South Asia Citizens Web

a report in The Hindu : With Maharashtra’s secular fabric ripped by the murders of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar and Communist leader Govind Pansare, noted activist-writer Dr. Bharat Patankar on Tuesday revealed that he too had received death threats in the form of hate letters.

If the Indian government wanted to become the laughing stock of the world, it couldn’t have done so more instantly and effectively than by banning the BBC documentary India’s Daughter on Delhi’s December 2012 gang-rape. Not only was the film watched by millions the world over; it became a cause celebre for feminists, defenders of free expression and even progressive Hollywood actors.

On the call of Centre for Human Rights Education- Pakistan and other civil society organizations hundreds of men and women got together in front of Lahore’s Press Club. The protestors who were carrying [placards] and banners against the Youhanabad incident chanted slogans against the attack on Christian Community and other incidents of terrorism in the name of religion and sect.

Unrelated to the mood swings of Delhi and Islamabad, certain citizens of Pakistan and the Indian Union have been trying for decades to foster dialogue and understanding between people living on the two sides of the western Radcliffe line. The more formal subset of this is termed ‘Track 2’ where influential folks from these two nation states periodically meet and deliberate. In addition to this, there are, what I want to term as ‘dhanda’ lobbies. Merchant chambers of various kinds are important in this and often they are among the most successful given their relative disinterest in the geopolitical origins of the products they want to trade vis a vis their interest in getting a good deal. They understand, as a commentator from west Punjab pointed out, that a tomato is neither Hindu nor Muslim. It is a tomato. But beyond these hard-nosed initiatives, much of what exists is a particular kind of ‘feel good’ posturing. Much of that can be reduced to two things — religion and commonality.

The Hindu, 14 March 2015
For Syed Sarifuddin Khan, the suspicion of rape was enough to set alight a tinderbox of regional discontent with the political dispensation, the permanent state of emergency, conflicting identities, thwarted aspirations and vexed histories, into a conflagration that incinerated him
The lynching of Syed Sarifuddin Khan, a 35-year-old Assamese man accused of rape and remanded to police custody, in Dimapur, Nagaland, on March 5, 2015, is one of the most troubling of (…)