South Asia Citizens Web

Farzana Perveen’s murder was not the first time men played the game of honour on a woman’s body. In societies like Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and much of the Middle East and Africa, this is an everyday reality women have to live with. According to a 2000 UN report, around 5000 women are killed every year around the world. There exists no UN research after that. In 2012-13, the global figure estimated by independent organizations was 20,000 killings per year. In Pakistan, HRCP reported the number of killings in 2012 at 949 and in 2013, at 869.

There is concern among Human Rights Activists about what will happen after the 19th of June, 2014. Padamshri Teesta Setalwad, Javed Anand, Tanvir Jafri, Salimbhai Sandhi and Firoz Gulzar Pathan face allegations including cheating, forgery, and criminal breach of trust in a case filed in January 2014 relating to the raising of funds for a riot memorial museum in Gulberg Society, Ahmedabad. The Gujarat High Court has stayed their arrest in the case until 19 June 2014 following their application for pre-arrest bail.

An accident in which six workers received burn injuries, three of them severely, occurred on 14 May 2014 at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) which is under the last phase of commissioning in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, South India. The Press Information Bureau of the Government of India states that the reactor was on a maintenance shut down and that the workers were repairing a valve at the time of the accident at 12.10 on 14 May, 2014. According to the Southern Regional (…)

Monikers make for alarmist headlines and also elide the reality. And
anodyne handwringing or widespread navel-gazing, though making for
indulgent introspection and stormy debates, seldom do enough to make us
think. Therefore, this time round, when “book police” and “textbook vigilante’
Dina Nath Batra got Orient Blackswan to put historian Sekhar
Bandyopadhyay’s From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India under
review, the lack of an outpouring of hysterical shock, grief and protests
came as a welcome relief, for this would enable us to view things in the
proper perspective.

Lecture delivered at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library