South Asia Citizens Web

Establishing the whole truth about the finale of the civil war in Sri Lanka requires an inquiry into the entire war and painstaking allocation of responsibility for casualties caused by multiple agents. Accountability for war crimes cannot be ensured unless divides between communities have first been bridged. Neither truth nor accountability is served by uncritical acceptance of accounts of the end of the war propagated by the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora. The priorities at present must be fighting against postwar violations of human rights and working for reconciliation between communities at a grassroots level.

This essay is a speculative exercise undertaken with the purpose of debating afresh one of the most hoary themes in the history of the working class - the question of intervention and agency. The subject is vast, and I will not pretend to have arrived at any definitive conclusion. The observations set out here are not based on an all-encompassing survey of labour history, but may be substantiated in a reading of some of my earlier research to which references will be provided. The exercise will begin with a consideration of certain well-worn positions, but will then attempt to analyse the functional notions of space and boundary inherent in the repeated use of the term outside',outsider’, "from without", etc in the language of managements and unionists of different hues. I will suggest that the question of the Outside is not merely one of the origins of consciousness (to which suffixes such as adequate',socialist’, `historical’, etc may be attached as per ideological preference), but also, and perhaps primarily, one of class domination and class power. Hence I will suggest an expansion of the historiographical use of the term. It is also about the types of plebeian agency and initiative, which the hegemons of labour found acceptable, versus those, which endangered their position and required to be thwarted in the immediate sense and disregarded historically.

Do you know what is the most popular sports in Pakistan these days? If your answer is cricket, you are way off the mark. The most popular sport in Pakistan is called “Aao Blasphemy Blasphemy khelain” and it is more lethal than most blood sports out there. There are no rules to this game. Any random person can get up and blame the other one of blasphemy and before you can ask them to spell blasphemy, the whole country gets involved in it.

Majority and morality do not mean the same thing.