South Asia Citizens Web

Full audio of the second Shahid Azmi memorial Lecture , delivered by Senior Lawyer at Mumbai High Court, Adv. Yug Mohit Chaudhary, on 9th February 2013, at the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi.

The Rape of Bangladeshi Women and Girls by the Pakistan Army in the Genocide of 1971 from Tarek Fatah on Vimeo.

Participants: Ritu Menon, Eminent Writer & Women’s Rights Activist, Women Unlimited, India; Anisuzzaman, Eminent Scholar & Professor Emeritus, Department of Bangla, Dhaka University, Bangladesh; Ibn Abdur Rehman, Peace & Human Rights Activist, Director, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Pakistan. Moderator: Ranabir Samaddar, Director, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India

Your visit to India was recently preceded by a tour to Algeria. If you recall in 1962 Simone de Beauvoir coauthored with Gisele Halimi a very powerful book ’Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl’. This had shocked and shaken liberal opinion in France of the early sixties. Her very fine intervention for citizen’s internationalism and for women’s rights everywhere came to symbolise a progressive image of France.

During his visit to India this week, French President Francois Hollande is likely to urge the government to conclude a questionable deal to purchase six nuclear European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) from the French company Areva for Jaitapur (Maharashtra). Though marketed as "the most advanced"
reactor, the EPR is commercially immature; not a single reactor has been commissioned anywhere in the world. Moreover at the construction sites at Olkiluoto (Finland) and Flamanville (France) costs and time have escalated dramatically from the initial projected figures, suggesting that each reactor will cost about Rs. 60,000 crore. So six could cost in excess of Rs. 3.5 lakh crore.