South Asia Citizens Web

The multiple factors which lead to communal violence remain unaddressed so the recurrence of these acts of violence goes on in such a painful way. Social activists and scholars have pointed out the role of communal forces, state machinery, irrespective of who is in power; the role of rumours, the ‘social common sense’ targeted against minorities persists. It is very sure that unless the problem is dealt with in its totality the country will keep suffering the pain of this violence and minorities in particular will keep suffering. It also reminds us as to what is the state of our democracy and the need for an effective and balanced Communal Violence Bill? No democracy can be satisfactory unless the minorities are safe and secure and are having equity in economic matters.

Remembering the past, its struggles and the actors and agents who advanced those struggles as a community is a key political act inextricably linked to our political journeys in the present. The past and the memories associated with it speak about our historical progress into the present, and therefore we tend to preserve the past in the form in which the past and its agents presented the past to us in the past. On other occasions, the voids of disillusionment and defeat into which the past leaves us often invoke romantic and illusory pictures of the past. As a result, we often desire to see the present to mirror the past without change or contamination. Our unceasing idealization of the past is not going to be a productive political practice in the long run. By keeping us within a circumscribed narrative of glorification, the past that we want to preserve and eulogize slowly weakens our critical eye. The present, as a consequence, finds itself crippled by obsolete forces. And the future appears as a blurred space in our visionless eyes.

Some time ago I visited a Dalit hamlet in Rewa district. It was hemmed in on all sides by the fields of upper-caste farmers, who refused to allow any approach road to reach the hamlet. There were short roads inside the hamlet, but they stopped abruptly at the edge of it. The hamlet felt like an
island, surrounded by hostile territory. I wondered whether any other country still cultivated such absurd and monstrous practices as the caste system.

Press freedom and human rights groups submit a report on the deteriorating media environment in Sri Lanka to the 12th session of the United Nations Working Group of the Universal Periodic Review.

An investigation by Ain o Salik Kendra (Dhaka): ’The Nischintapur factory fire is the worst in Bangladesh’s industrial history, one already strewn with innumerable deaths and injuries, caused by callous indifference and a reckless disregard for workers’ safety’’