South Asia Citizens Web

Finally, the cat is out of the bag. That has been now said in so many words which the weltanshauung of the rightwing Hindutva election campaign has been remorselessly leading upto, namely that those who are inimical to a likely Narendra Modi-led government are anti-national, and "have no place in India and should go to Pakistan." Thus, what has been a consistently insinuated sub-text of the Modi campaign has found articulation as actually the main plank of the RSS-mentored push for state power.

In this remarkable and courageous book, Manoj Mitta (senior editor with the Times of India who writes on legal, human rights and public policy issues) mounts a devastating critique of the final report of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by RK Raghavan, the reports of the amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, the Chief Minister and aspiring prime minister Narendra Modi, the Gujarat judiciary and by implication the state and central governments too for failing to deliver justice to the over 2000 victims of organised violence in the Gujarat pogrom, 2002, which caused extensive destruction of property as well. The author goes into the voluminous new material produced by the SIT on the violence based on the complaint by Zakia Jafri, widow of Ehsan Jafri, who alleged, among other things, that Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 62 top police and administrative officials of the state were behind the conspiracy to commit massive collective violence against Muslims in the Gulberg Society area of Ahmedabad, resulting in the massacre of 69 persons including her husband.

SUBRAMANIAN Swamy’s ‘estimate’ that ‘one-third of Bangladesh’s population lives in India’ and suggestion that Bangladesh ‘should compensate by giving land to India’ if it ‘does not agree to take back its people’ may be, as reported in New Age on Sunday, the senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s own view, and not his party’s, but are extremely incendiary. Bangladesh-bashing, especially on ‘illegal infiltration’, seems to have become a significant part of election-time rhetoric, particularly by the ultra-rightist BJP. Suffice to say, such rhetoric is generally one-sided and packed with manufactured statistics, if not blatant lies.

A two part article by Muktadir Rashid.

Arrest is the latest in a series of cases against foreign nationals based on perceived threats to Buddhism. A female British tourist in Sri Lanka has been detained and faces deportation for having a Buddha tattoo on her arm.