South Asia Citizens Web

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 (…)

Gandhi Kathakar Narayan Desai, son of Mahatma Gandhi’s personal secretary and biographer Mahadev Desai passed away today morning at 4.00 am. His funeral procession will take place at 2.00 pm today in Vedchhi in south Gujarat.

I received the shocking news of Tahira Ali’s death on the morning of March 10 when her daughter, Yasmeen, called me from Thatta. Mohammad Ali Shah, the president of Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum and Tahira Ali, who ruled the hearts of the fishing communities like a queen, met an accident. Shah is under treatment at the Aga khan Hospital but Tahira has left us.

In the name of religious sentiments, an attempt is made to prevent the emergence of a society that can think and act for itself