South Asia Citizens Web

On the evening of May 13, an assassin stepped out of a car that had just driven to the doorstep of Sardar Arif Shahid’s residence in Rawalpindi. He waited for the 62-year-old Kashmiri leader to arrive. After pumping four bullets into him, the killer calmly got back into the car and was whisked away.

The political and religious right has long been terrified of the appearance in public of any activities related to love, sex and individual choice. We can recount valentine’s day vandalism, the actions of the Sri Ram Sene in Mangalore where they attacked women in pubs and at parties, demands for ban on sex toys, frequent demands for censorship of films, support for curfews on women, exhortations to women to not forget their “Indian culture” and numerous other instances.

Though interreligious violence in Sri Lanka is not new, the emergence of the well-organized, well-connected Buddhist radical group reflects a broader problem today. The latest, and perhaps most disturbing development in post-war Sri Lanka’s ethnic relations is the recent rise of a Buddhist activist group, Bodu Bala Sena (BBS-Buddhist power force), driven against Sri Lankan Muslims, the island’s third ethnic minority. BBS explains its mission as strengthening the Buddhist faith in the island, providing spiritual leadership and saving Sinhala Buddhism from external threats.

The killings of Mahendra Karma and his colleagues call not for retributive violence but for a deeper reflection on the discontent among the tribals of central India and their dispossession

as things stand today Huballi (Hubli’s new name, the name Hubballi literally means "Hu" - flower and "Balli" - creeper in Kannada.) seems to have metamorphosed into ’birthplace’ of Hindutva terror in Karnataka and a strong link in the emerging pan Indian network of Hindutva terror.