South Asia Citizens Web

The PM may call for a moratorium on communal violence, but having reaped the benefits of sectarian polarisation, can he now stop his Hindu undivided family from spreading such hate? Like the vacuum cleaner salesman in the joke found out, your grand machine may not always be able to clean up the rubbish you have dumped.

The religious right wing became redundant as the global geo-political forces (and Pakistan’s own establishment) quashed their lifelong partnership with the religious establishment especially political Islam. Being religious got outdated. Being liberal became politically lucrative compared with right-wing ideologies and safer compared to being ‘secular.’ That dirty expletive: ‘secular!’

The heavily barbed fence separated me from Sialkot on the other side of the border.

Mukul Dube’s photos of the on going protest dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on 12 November 2014

Peoples Union for Democratic Rights has time and again critiqued the use of draconian laws, of which sedition is a putrid kind, to stifle political dissent and eliminate political and ideological opposition. However, the recent use of the law of sedition shows its widening use in a manner which takes this defacement to the basic freedoms of individuals to express and conduct themselves in public spaces. Acts such as wearing T-shirts of a rival cricket team or cheering for it and not standing up for the national anthem in a theatre are regarded as offence enough to be charged under the law of sedition. These cases of sedition are far from being sporadic and random and are part of a chain of events along the slippery slope of majoritarianism.