South Asia Citizens Web

A moratorium on cross-border firing, which largely held from 2003 to 2012, stands broken. About two dozen lives have been lost since the beginning of this year. Why? The breakdown did not come from Nawaz Sharif who, risking his popularity within his party, has been arguing forcefully for peace with India.

Bengaluru: The Karnataka High Court has come to the rescue of a 27-year-old man, who was born to Tibetan refugees in India but was declined Indian citizenship and passport by regional passport authorities. The Regional Passport Office had denied him the passport, saying those born to Tibetan refugees in India cannot be automatically treated as Indian citizens under the Citizenship Act.Aggrieved by the order of the Regional Passport Office, Koramangala, which had consulted the Ministry of (…)

I have a happy dream. Sometimes, when I am particularly distressed by the politics that carries on in our sorrowful subcontinent adding to its various peoples’ misery, I allow myself to be lost in this delicious dream. I imagine myself sailing to Cox’s Bazar.

Thirty years ago, a group of students from Delhi University went on a long walking tour of the Narmada valley. The journey was arduous, and it was not undertaken for pleasure. The students wished to study, at first-hand, “the possible environmental impact of the massive hydroelectric and irrigation complex planned for the Valley, and to see and document the existing natural and cultural heritage of the [Narmada] river”. They wrote a report based on their trip, versions of which were published in the The Ecologist of London and the Economic and Political Weekly of Mumbai. Rich, fact-filled, and written in understated prose, these documents are of considerable historical interest. For it was by reading the article in the EPW that Medha Patkar, then a social activist in the city of Mumbai, decided to shift to the Narmada valley to work there.

two posters by Harsh Kapoor for a public event on Demilitarisation, Democracy and social justice in South Asia organised by SAAPE in New Delhi on 24 August 2013