South Asia Citizens Web

The guns fell silent more than 40 years ago, but the scars of Bangladesh’s short, bloody struggle for independence still burn to this day

Badri Raina is like an all-season fruit-bearing tree. And the more he ages the mellower gets the fruit he bears. The 134 essays gathered between the covers of this book and written for Z-net over six years between 2006 and 2011 are ample testimony to his engaged critical productivity. Each essay is a timely, more than instantaneous, response to some pressing issue—be it embodied in an event, a pronouncement, a person, a law, a policy, a report, or a possibility crying imperatively to be cast into action. But beyond this, the essays also transcend the contingency of their moment under the force and lucidity of Raina’s reason which, aided by a ready and exact memory working as a sixth sense, never fails to put together the bigger picture. As a result, the essays together constitute a critical history of our times.

Abstract:
This paper looks at militancy and radicalization in Punjab – North, Central and South – the three sub-regions of the largest province of Pakistan. The key argument of this study is that radicalization is a greater issue in Punjab than militancy primarily because militants tend to groom people for battles outside the country or the prov- ince. Thus, there is violence in the province but those figures are not commensurate with the actual amount of radicalization that takes place in (…)

Britain, [. . .] simply courts ridicule and bolsters a reputation for hypocrisy by denouncing a government for egregious violations of human rights while at the same time selling it guns.

. . .there is little doubt left in the hearts and minds of all Pakistanis that we are now facing genocide in Pakistan where 20 percent of the population is being targeted for its faith.