South Asia Citizens Web

In a shocking and arbitrary exercise of power on the 7th June, 2014, the Jaipur Development Authority, directly under the Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, sealed the complete premises of the Rajasthan Samagra Sewa Sangh which had been in existence on its own land since 1959. They threw out all the residents and their belongings, cancelled the allotment and took over their land.

SAHMAT strongly condemns this incident in California where a pro-Modi supporter of Hindutava threatened Shubha Mudgal at a concert, for her vocal and public opposition to the Hindutva forces.

Nations trapped in the cycle of fate can’t resist a recurrent deathwish even when they know it is a deathwish. Turks can’t live down their primal hatred of Armenians, and become Turks only when they collectively hate them. Iranians have the same kind of emotion about the Bahai. Once Germans hated Jews and killed a lot of them to post their “greatness” to the world. Pakistan’s deathwish hatred is against the Ahmadi community. It lives as a nation only if it kills Ahmadis and ceases to be a nation if it stops killing them.
Pakistan’s “greatness” as a nation was asserted soon after it had its first real constitution, in 1973. The second amendment inserted into it — to remove the “flaw” of the original text — apostatised the Ahmadi community, a sect which controversially thought its founder a “prophet without a book”.

History will judge the just concluded elections as republican India’s first intensively televised elections. Never have close to four hundred news networks (they equal the number of entertainment networks, such is the saleability of “news” in our culture) in a bewildering variety of languages and dialects communicated political messages from an equally bewildering array of politicians and political actors across the country. But, equally, never have so many news networks dished out the same fare: Narendra Modi. The Narendra Modi persona, for good or for bad has been largely a television media construction, amplified by saturation-point coverage of the leader, spread out over more than six months—staggering and almost unprecedented, even by global standards.

The brutal rape and lynching of two girls in Badaun should shock the collective conscience of all Indians, regardless of their class, caste, religious or ethnic background. But does it?