South Asia Citizens Web

Dr Niron knows the Sri Lankan army targeted hospitals in 2009. Every time he passed their location on to the International Red Cross so they could share the information with the Sri Lankan military, the site was bombed within days, if not hours.

Ruskin College, founded in central Oxford in 1899, has recently sold its main Walton Street building to Exeter College and has moved to the outskirts of the city at Headington. This has been seen as an opportunity, by some, to ditch the College’s past both literally and metaphorically. The College was a repository of lived experience of the trade union and labour movement of the twentieth century and its records complemented that. Much material from Ruskin’s past has already been physically trashed. This includes admission records of some of the trade union students who attended Ruskin in its first decades. These were activists, sponsored by their unions, who usually went back into the trade union and labour movement as leaders.

A compilation of news, commentary, statements by Human rights fora and response by secular platforms in Bangaldesh to the violent attack on Buddhist shrines.

In the well-established tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn reflected on Russia’s past, her relation with the West, and the crisis of modern civilization; but he departed from that tradition in significant ways.

The Gujarat pogrom illustrates why we cling so fiercely to the idea of the democratic public – namely because it provides us with a comfortable dichotomy between good and evil, freedom and power, public and authority. At the same time, an event such as the Gujarat pogrom forces us – scholars, journalists, members of different publics - to ask how far we, against growing empirical evidence, also cling to the idea of conventional anti-democratic measures, such as censorship, and totalitarian logics in “other countries”, in terms of ruthless dictators who suppress their people, for the sake of keeping up the democratic public in our imagination (and at the risk of becoming inadvertently complicit in its absence). We like to assume that as soon as there is no censorship and no identifiable dictator, public(-ness) equals democracy (which explains why the Gujarat pogrom is hardly known outside India and has done so little to tarnish India’s popular image as the world’s largest democracy). The public, however, is also a determining agent in post- or non-dictatorial anti-democracy, not only in “other” (read non-western) countries but on a global level, and very much in the west itself.