South Asia Citizens Web

It is high time the authorities looked into this extremely important subject that frames national identity. Generations have been fed­ on half truths and distorted facts.

The largest port on the Arabian Sea, Karachi today has a population over 20 million, on a par with Mumbai, and ranks as the world’s eighth biggest city. Commanding the north-east quadrant of the ocean, with a hinterland stretching up the Indus Valley to Afghanistan, it has been the principal entry-point for us arms and supplies in the ‘war on terror’, while refugees—and heroin—have flowed in the opposite direction. From the bloodstained birth of Pakistan with the Partition of British India, the city’s explosive growth has more often been fuelled by the ‘push’ of geopolitical, agrarian and ecological crises than by the ‘pull’ of economic development. Life in its sprawling katchi abadis, or ‘unpaved settlements’, has much in common with that of other giant undercities, such as Mumbai’s, with the exception that violence plays a significantly greater role here. The vast majority of Karachiites are not only entangled in competition with each other, in a desperate struggle for survival, but must also contend with a brutal climate of aggression fuelled by gangsterized political groupings, the most influential of which also control the armed force of the state. In what conditions do its inhabitants live and what could drive increasing numbers of newcomers to try to survive here?

Frontline, Volume 29 - Issue 17 :: Aug. 25-Sep. 07, 2012 PUBLIC HEALTH
Built-in violence
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
Stereotypical government policies and global approaches persist in family planning programmes.
Urmila is a 40-year-old domestic worker in western Uttar Pradesh. The mother of six children, all girls, she is now pregnant again and is keen on carrying on with the pregnancy. Her husband is unemployed and is an alcoholic. His relatives have assured her that they will help her to (…)

The most disturbing finding in the judgment of the trial court in the Naroda Patiya mass murder case is not only the active involvement of a prominent senior BJP leader, Mayaben Surendrabhai Kodnani, who hatched the conspiracy and instigated the rioters to commit the crime, but the fact that she was sought to be shielded by the state investigating agency by making every effort to see that her involvement did not come on record. Two questions arise here: first, can the leaders of a ruling political party be allowed to indulge in crime against members of another religion? And, second, what is the role assigned to the investigating agency of the state when a serious, cognisable offence takes place?

This book is an account of the broader rationalist movement in India of which Sanal Edamaruku is a prominent member, and a vivid description of its origins, practices and beliefs. A monograph on the radical avowal of scientific reason, it fills a much needed lacuna in the annals of modern India.