South Asia Citizens Web

Swami Aseemanand, the Hindu firebrand accused of plotting several terrorist attacks on civilian targets across the country between 2006 and 2008 . . . RSS launched its most vehement public protest (and one of the largest in its history) a week and a half before Aseemanand was arrested, in November 2010—on behalf of Indresh Kumar, whose name had begun cropping up in media reports about the investigations. The Sangh’s chiefs marshalled a nationwide protest. According to Organiser, more than a million people participated in over 700 dharnas across the country; virtually the entire leadership of the RSS and the VHP appeared on stage at the rallies.

Democracy involves subjecting ourselves to a difficult discipline. We are often tempted to equate democracy with the simple will of the majority. The problem with this was demonstrated in Athens, the birthplace of democracy, when a majority of citizens voted to execute Socrates. To guard against such miscarriages of justice the political thinker Montesquieu recommended separating the judiciary, the executive and the legislature, a principle incorporated into all modern democracies. What Montesquieu could not anticipate is the way media, especially social media, would come to dominate public opinion.

We now have over one hundred signatories, including the pioneer of peace studies Johan Galtung, physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, biologist and science broadcaster David Suzuki, peace educator Betty Reardon, political scientist Karel van Wolferen, and Pulitzer-prize winning historian Martin Sherwin. Other signers are leading authors, scholars, and filmmakers, representatives of various peace organizations, and citizens who have been committed to ending military colonization of Okinawa.

With the January 5 ‘elections’ unable to provide the government with the requisite political or moral legitimacy to govern the country, Awami league politicians have focused on shoring up their right to govern by pointing to the need to deal with the violence committed by the opposition parties during the pre-election vehicle burning and post-election communal attacks.
This strategy has also had the added benefit of helping the government to justify the joint forces’ operation to remove ‘terrorism’ from the country, which has since the elections resulted in a spate of deaths of opposition leaders and activists.