South Asia Citizens Web

Pabnava of Haryana and Natham of Tamilnadu, separated from each other by hundreds of kilometers, peopled by communities speaking different languages and cultures, is it possible to connect one with the other. Should one claim that they are examples of India’s much celebrated ‘Unity in Diversity’ ? The manner in which dalits ’copy’ their oppressor/dominant castes is visible also from areas which are infamous for medieval sounding decisions of the caste/community councils.

Year 1982. It was a second class compartment of a Jabalpur bound train. I, along with my friend Nilanjan Mukhopadhayay, was going to Jabalpur to participate in an event against communal politics organized by IPTA. One of our fellow travelers was a quiet, almost withdrawn old gentleman, his constant reading interspersed by bouts of reflectively looking out of the window. We took him to be a retired teacher, heading home.

The David Headley Lies Continue: There is Nothing ‘New’ About It
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This is a quote often misattributed to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. So widely is it believed to have been the key to Goebbelsian propaganda that it often employed by those whose politics is inspired by Goebbels’s Feuhrer.
This is exactly what we are seeing in this frenzied rush to pronounce Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar (…)

For all its problems, Algeria never became an Islamic state. Like Algerian progressives in the 1990s, Egyptian progressives now have to carve out the space to construct a credible alternative under the shield of the new transitional process, and simultaneously challenge the military’s human rights abuses

The consequences of leaving nuclear bosses to their own devices are too dangerous to contemplate. Fifteen years after Pokhran-II, it is possible the world knows less about India’s nuclear weapons programme than any other nuclear state, except North Korea. This is not proud company for the world’s largest democracy to share.