South Asia Citizens Web

Sindh Agrarian Reforms Council was launched on Friday at a gathering held at a local hotel. The meeting was organized by National Peasants’ Coalition of Pakistan (NPCP) and Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) in collaboration with Oxfam. More than 80 participants including Parliamentarians, civil society activists, journalists, peasants and people belonging to different sections of society attended the meeting and endorsed the initiative.

The era of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often associated with its practices of “thought reform”—the ways in which the masses were indoctrinated into CCP ideology, self-criticism sessions, and mass “struggles” against counterrevolutionaries. However, until now, a comprehensive study of the pre-Communist origins of thought reform as a concept, and its evolution in implementation, have been left curiously understudied.

The Delhi Police comes directly under the Union Home Ministry and the Christian groups in Delhi had organmised a Peace March yesterday upto the office of the Home Minister Mr. Rajnath Singh. Not only the Delhi police has been dishing out ridiculous and irresponsible statements justifying its inaction against the miscreants, it resorted to beating and thrashing peaceful protesters today in the national capital.

People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) joins all freedom loving people in denouncing the attempts to harass Ms. Shirin Dalvi, the reputed editor of the Urdu daily, Avadhanama, Mumbai in the name of hurting religious sentiments of Muslims. She had published a news story on the Charlie Hebdo massacre and republished a cover of the French magazine. Though she has apologized and stated that she did not have any intention to hurt religious sentiments of anybody she, however, has been charged with several different cases offences and even arrested. The newspaper she works for has had to close down and all its employees have been deprived of their jobs. All this is happening in the name of someone’s sentiments.

Officials in northwest Pakistan have revised school textbooks to make them more Islamic — no unveiled women, references to world historical figures replaced with prominent Muslims, and Koranic verses about jihad.