South Asia Citizens Web

We, the Women Living under Muslim Laws international solidarity network, are dismayed by the announcement that the US government is to start direct talks with the Afghan Taliban. The first round of talks is scheduled to take place in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban set up a political office in January. We demand that a very clear and explicit commitment be made to guarantee the rights of all, especially the rights of women and children by all parties involved in the talks. Justice and the human rights of all Afghan people, as enshrined in the Afghan Constitution, must be at the centre of any talks or negotiations with the Taliban or any other armed group.

Activists and monks affiliated with the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) have been a driving force for Sinhala supremacism in recent years.

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.