South Asia Citizens Web

This is a film by Deba Ranjan Sarangi about the killing of 17 innocent adivasis, six of them minor, by paramilitary forces on 28th June 2012 at Basaguda area of Chhatishgarh.

Ten years after the Gujarat killings, a special court in Ahmedabad has found 32 people guilty of premeditated violence in the massacre of 99 Muslims in Naroda Patia, one of the many murderous sprees that made up the pogrom of 2002. This is a landmark judgment because in India the instigators of murderous communal violence are almost never held to account. The court’s judgment is a landmark because it highlights the enormity of the evil of 2002 and it demonstrates how close we were to endorsing the political class’s sense of murderous entitlement by being prepared to look the other way and ’move on’

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995. It was among the first things the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition sarkar did on coming to power in Maharashtra.
You might think the news has yet to reach ’em posh people who still refer to their quarter of the metropolis as ’South Bombay’. In fact, it’s SoBo now!
Could SoBo symbolise a cosmopolitan resistance to the chauvinism of the Senas? Banish the thought, the SoBoietis love their Thackerays. (Perhaps Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, too.) Call it the mutual attraction of the bold and the beautiful.

This paper re-examines the nature of the Muslim League’s mobilization of the UP Muslims during the period of Congress party rule and the extent to which it was successful in emerging as their ‘authoritative, representative organization’. In the light of such a re-examination, the paper makes two arguments. First, in contrast to the existing historiography which highlights the role of Jinnah in the ML’s revival, this paper underlines the agency of the local leadership of the ML in this process. Second, the paper argues that even though the ML emerged as a popular political party among the UP Muslims in this period, its strength still remained uncertain. This became evident during the Madhe Sahaba agitation between 1938 and 1939 that led to serious tensions and riots between Shias and Sunnis in the city of Lucknow. These tensions threatened to fracture the political base of the ML in the UP besides snowballing into a wider all-India conflict. During this crisis the ML stood aside helplessly, unable to exert its authority as the ‘premier’ organization of the Indian Muslims. These divisions within the Muslim community in the ML’s putative bastion in the UP demonstrate that the party still had a task ahead in terms of rallying the Qaum.

When Jinnah said that "religion and state should be kept separate", he could not have more appropriately warned the people of present-day Pakistan where the constitutionally supported, man-made religious doctrines issued by fundamentalists continue, to ruin lives.