South Asia Citizens Web

Bangladeshi man runs across a makeshift bridge, as it starts to rain in Cooch Bihar district in the Indian State of West Bengal. © Manpreet Romana/NYT
In November 2012, The New York Times ran two paired pieces written from both sides of the Bengal border.
Jyoti Rahman analyzes both articles: “Naeem is a few years older than me, and Mr Ray is likely to be slightly younger. That means, all of us were born decades after partition. Ours is the generation that has not known Pakistan in (…)

Who is a muktijoddha? It seems apparent.. any one who has fought for the freedom of Bangladesh. But was it and is it so apparent. Many discourses and contestations are rife in Bangladesh. Our muktijoddhas were not only our “damal chelera” (our gallant boys) but also their mothers who cooked for them, sisters who hid their weapons. Were not birangonas or war heroines, muktijoddhas too? Finally, shahids too were muktijoddhas, including those who fought not with guns but their thoughts!

Narendra Modi of the RSS is an ambitious man who seems to want to become the prime minister of the country. His propaganda machine never speaks of the violence in 2002 in the state he ruled and rules, but it constantly plugs his hand in its development. I do not propose here to question the claims of development that he makes or which are made for him. Better qualified people have done that and have shown that these claims are based on sleight of hand or on outright lies. I shall only look at the meaning of this development business in Modi’s lexicon.

25 March 2013 - Text of Statement from the organising group of the Delhi HM conference. Over the past few days there have been suggestions that the journal Historical Materialism (HM) is run by Britain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), that the SWP is associated with the Delhi HM Conference on 3–5 April 2013, and that in light of the rape crisis in the SWP, the Delhi HM conference should be boycotted or disrupted. Both propositions underlying the boycott and disruption call are absolutely false. . . .

In early 2000, for instance, two-thirds of married Indian women surveyed by the United Nations Population Fund claimed to have been forced into sex by their husbands.