South Asia Citizens Web

Photos of the public advertisement that appeared in India’s newspapers re Mukhyamantri Teerth-Darshan Yojna of Madhya Pradesh that is funding travel by train for religious pilgrimages

Editorial in Economic and Political Weekly, 18 May 2013: The decision by the Supreme Court (SC) to allow commissioning of the Koodankulam nuclear power plants might have been expected but is still disappointing. The disappointment comes not from the decision in and of itself, but in the logic that has been used to justify it.

K. Siddaramaiah, a rare Indian politician who wears his atheism on his sleeve, took the oath as the next chief minister of Karnataka on Monday by solemnly affirming to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India.

Since the summer of 2012 Burma has seen pogroms, massacres, riots of unprecedented scale against religious minorities, the latest being on the 30th April. Few hundreds have been killed and few hundred thousands have been rendered homeless.

While people of Bangladesh were seem to reinvigorating the spirit of its four decade old war of liberation, the campaign launched by youth activists and bloggers demanding exemplary punishment to war criminals was gaining further momentum, with tens of thousands of men and women congregating at Shahbagh square, and Bangladesh’s largest religious-political outfit, Jamaat-e-Islami was further finding itself in a tight spot since the war crimes trials began, as many of its leading activists stood convicted for their crimes against humanity during 1971, came the news that Hefazat-e-Islam, a relatively new group based in Chittagong, bursting out on the centre stage of the nation’s politics with its demands which were at complete variance with this new mood. While the overwhelming demand was to ban ’politics based on religion’, the Hefazat brigade was seeking the exact opposite.