South Asia Citizens Web

We are writing to you to communicate our concern regarding recent spate of communal tension and violence in different areas and the rising sense of insecurity in the Muslim community of Delhi. At several instances, organized campaigns have been taken to spread hatred and create tension centering religious festivals.

Prof Uma Chakravarti delivered the Sixth Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture on the 12th of July, 2014 on the topic "Nirbhaya, Muzaffarnagar, Badaun And Beyond: Sexual Violence In Contemporary Indian Society." The lecture was held at Karimi Library Hall, First Floor, Main Building, Anjuman-I-Islam, Opp Cst Station, Fort, Mumbai.

Inaugurating Mukesh Ambani’s new hospital in Mumbai on Saturday 25th October 2014, the Prime minister stunned the nation by claiming that the Mahabharat’s story of Karna, who was not born of his mother’s womb, was evidence of the fact that “genetic science” was prevalent at the time, and that worshippers of Lord Ganesh should reflect that there must have been some “plastic surgeon” who performed the “surgery” of affixing an elephant head on to a human body!

The violent events of 1984 signify the breakdown of consensual politics and the ideal of composite Indian nationhood. When communal animosity spreads across society, it corrodes the social conscience and (directly or subliminally) produces a genocidal consensus.

Ghulam Azam, the once all powerful leader of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, who died recently, might have brooded over this old dictum, in his last days in detention. It was only last year that he was sentenced to 90 years of imprisonment for his crimes against humanity which he committed when people of the then East Pakistan - todays Bangladesh - had risen up against the occupation army of Pakistan in the year 1971.