South Asia Citizens Web

[ The Hindu, 16 Jan 2014 ; The Friday Times (Lahore), 17 Jan 2014 ]
“Hey there mister can you tell me what happened to the seeds I’ve sown
Can you give me a reason sir as to why they’ve never grown?
They’ve just blown around from town to town
Till they’re back out on these fields
Where they fall from my hand
Back into the dirt of this hard land”
– Bruce Springsteen, This Hard Land
Few moments in the past century evoked as much hope in its stakeholders than the emergence of (…)

The surrender of a major publishing firm (Penguin India) over Professor Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, an Alternative History, in a recent out-of-court settlement that involves the withdrawal of the book and the pulping of its copies, has rightly aroused much disquiet among all circles committed to freedom of speech and respect for scholarly disagreements.

This report presents our findings as a fact-finding team (FFT) that went to Karbi Anglong district mid-January (2014) to inquire into a series of targeted attacks and the retaliatory violence that followed. As a team, we sought to fully comprehend the factual record and the specific political context within which these incidents occurred. We have found that perpetrators of violence have not been identified, far less brought to book. This has allowed for rumour to flourish and mutual suspicions to mount. A deepening estrangement between the Karbis and Rengma Nagas living in the district could be the outcome. The multiple armed groups that operate in the district and the wider region with agendas that remain unclear, often using methods of terror and extortion, could become bolder as a result.

In honour of the determination of people like Algerian TV producer, Aziz Smati, who was shot exactly twenty years ago today, we must support all those who wield song against suicide belt, and wage art against fundamentalism, writes Karima Bennoune

A man with a grandfatherly moustache, another in saintly robes and reportage on the saffron face of terror that went unnoticed