South Asia Citizens Web

We write as a coalition of civil society organizations from around the world to express our serious alarm regarding revelations of Internet and telephone communications surveillance of US and non-US citizens by the US government. We also wish to express our grave concern that US authorities may have made the data resulting from those surveillance activities available to other States, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand. Many US-based Internet companies with global reach also seem to be participating in these practices.

The political battle is now an economic one. Millions are forcibly displaced across the country for "development" and for the profit of others. An ostensibly democratic polity may use authoritarianism and violence on those on the margins but expands its repertoire to repress dissent in the mainstream.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s appointment of a weakly qualified human rights commission with little public consultation raises concerns about the country’s most important rights body.

My daughter Ishrat Jehan was abducted, illegally confined and killed in cold blood by officers and men of the Gujarat police, in June 2004. She was killed as part of a larger conspiracy which had a political agenda. Ishrat’s murder was projected as an ‘encounter’ and justified by branding her a terrorist who had come with 3 other men to attack the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. This was not the first fake encounter in Gujarat, other Muslims too had been executed in similar staged encounters, committed in the name of protecting the Chief Minster of Gujarat. Some of these other fake encounters, which are nothing but pre meditated extra judicial killings, are already under investigation and prosecution.

The Karnataka police arrested nine persons with Sangh Parivar links for allegedly setting off a bomb in the court of the junior first class magistrate in Hubli May 2008. They were also accused of planting a live bomb on the Dharwad-Belgaum road. This points to the presence of Hindutva terror suspects in the state.