South Asia Citizens Web

Vina Mazumdar speaking in the film ’Unlimited Girls’ and a long excerpt from Urvashi Butalia’s tribute to Vina Mazumdar.

In a country like ours, freedom can be bought with money, and usually in rape cases the offenders are in some position of influence or power. It is very hard for survivors belonging to lower-income groups to even get the police to believe that they have been raped. Especially if she’s levying charges against somebody who is more well-off than she is. Whether it’s actually in terms of money, or it’s in terms of social position in society.

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.