South Asia Citizens Web

In her riveting memoir of growing up in the GDR, Marion Brasch recounts that her father reported her brother (the soon-to-be-famous) Thomas Brasch to the Socialist Unity Party (SED) after Thomas distributed leaflets against the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The harrowing conflict between a rigid, dedicated communist father and a rebellious, idiosyncratic son is the central, but far from only, example in this moving narrative of the unhappy interplay between ideological commitment to a controlling state and the psychological dynamics of a dysfunctional family. Brasch lays bare the story of a socially isolated and gradually disintegrating family whose members continued to believe in the promise of communal society even as some of them defiantly rejected real, existing socialism.

On Sunday 16 June, gunmen on motorbikes shot dead two polio workers carrying out a vaccination drive in Peshawar, a crowded city in Pakistan’s north-west. One of the men who died was a schoolteacher, the other a paramedic. Both left behind grieving families. Their deaths bring the total tally of polio workers assassinated in Pakistan up to nearly 20 since last December.

I am resolutely opposed to the politics represented by Narendra Modi, which I find deeply inimical to the pluralist and humane idea of India, to secular democracy, and to caring and inclusive governance. There are many, on the other hand, who are evidently greatly attracted by his muscular style of leadership and his focus on market-led economic growth. The battle between these two ideas of India and of government is the stuff of democracy. But I wish this battle is fought without resort to untruth and disinformation.

COMMUNALISM, a twisted offshoot of religion, breeds in a fertile manmade atmosphere of strife. But it also thrives in natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods and cyclones. The current rain-induced havoc in Uttarakhand, host to several Hindu pilgrimages in India’s Himalayan foothills, spurred Narendra Modi to hog the limelight. The human tragedy was thus deftly converted into a political windfall with an eye on the bilious politician’s religio-fascist agenda. The aim is to win the 2014 Indian elections by whatever means.

Today, 27 June, 2013, the International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) released the report entitled, “Merchants of Menace: Repressing workers in India’s new industrial belt, Violations of workers’ and trade union rights at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.”