South Asia Citizens Web

Intellectuals who are quite enamoured about the tolerance inherent in ’our great culture’ and the sense of inclusiveness would rather be shell-shocked to find that how the ordinary, peace-loving people themselves are ready to ’metamorphose overnight’ into murderers and rapists of their own neighbours on a small pretext. All the orgy of violence and their ’joyous participation’ in it is then followed by a conspiracy of silence where nobody is then ready to talk the truth. Bhagalpur in Bihar which had become such a site of violence in 1989 where officially over a thousand people had been slain

“It is beyond belief that a judiciary could be so insensitive to deny even the basic humanitarian ground of bail for a few days to Soni Sori, to allow her to make arrangements for her three young children after the death of their father,” said Kalpana Mehta, convener of Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression.

Pakistan Peace Coalition (PPC) and Peoples SAARC (Pakistan Process) on Thursday announced postponement of Pakistan-India Joint Independence Day Peace Celebrations at the Sindh-Rajasthan border, scheduled to be held at Khokhrapar in Umerkot district in Pakistan on August 14, 2013.

THE Indo-Pak whodunit has been getting clichéd, so much so that you can almost predict the pattern of events before they play out. It is not unusual for terror attacks to come at a moment when mutual bonhomie looks nigh in South Asia. Is Pakistan’s deep state the only beneficiary of these disruptions? Or is there someone rejoicing in the Indian establishment too when militarism, buoyed by terrorism, is accorded the front row in our daily lives regardless of the prohibitive costs?

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has polarised opinion for nearly 70 years. For some it is an unforgivable stain on human history, the moment when the world fell to scientific horror. For others it was a necessary evil to bring an end to the Second World War - a conflict which had brought countries around the globe to their knees. What is without doubt is the world was inextricably changed when the Allies decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.
On August 6, 1945, (…)