South Asia Citizens Web

Wimal Fernando, the veteran left and democratic rights activist and former trade unionist, was interviewed by Ahilan Kadirgamar and Balasingham Skanthakumar in January 2011. These excerpts were transcribed and annotated by B. Skanthakumar. The interview is published in Pathways of the Left in Sri Lanka, edited by Marshal Fernando and B. Skanthakumar, Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue, Colombo 2014, pp. 217-240.

This weekend marked Raksha Bandhan, a festival dedicated to strengthening bonds of love, affection and support between brothers and sisters. The threads that sisters tie on their brothers’ wrists are symbolic of what binds them and what they expect from each other. It is a festival that has been celebrated to cement relationships beyond familial ones and one in which people of many communities have traditionally participated. It is a matter of concern that this year, the Sangh Parivar has launched a campaign all over India to ’celebrate’ this festival in its own unique fashion. Thousands of volunteers carrying bags of rakhis are to fan out all over the country, specially to villages in Uttar Pradesh, so that Hindu girls and women can tie rakhis on their Hindu brothers’ wrists in order to protect them from Muslim men and forced conversions.

Scanned copy of the mid 1977 advertisement by a Tarkunde Civil Rights Committee launching investigations into encounter deaths in Andhra Pradesh.

The appointment of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao as the new chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) may have been disappointing, but surely not unexpected. It has been widely reported in the mainstream media that Y S Rao’s opinions on historical matters align very closely with the world view of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other Hindutva ideologues. These views include a celebration of the caste system and an assertion that epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are exact expositions of events as they happened while also being compendia of “Indian” morality. His corpus of work as a historian, on the other hand, remains largely unpublished and unknown. It is evident that the new ICHR head has been appointed to push the Hindutva version of history and institutionalise it as much as possible.

147 workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL) in Bhondsi jail will be waiting patiently for the decision of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana on bail plea of two of the 147 workers. They have been in jail since two years after manager Awanish Kumar Dev was killed in an instance of rioting in Maruti’s Manesar plant on 18 July 2012.