South Asia Citizens Web

With citizens being charged with sedition for speaking their minds, with books and films being banned or censored, not just by the state but by chauvinist forces, with artists forced to flee the country for offending ‘public sentiment’, with historical enquiry stalled and history being rewritten, we are seeing increasing constraints on freedom of expression says Dilip Simeon. When such practices become common in democratic systems, they inaugurate the slide towards tyranny

Our justice system presented us with two enormously important judgments on Wednesday, August 29. Both were about mass murder. But we responded to these two verdicts very differently. Which once again gives away our shameful prejudices, mindless priorities and silent fears.

Indian Internet advocates and journalists are in an uproar this week over the news that the government has blocked access to around 300 websites, pages, and social media accounts in an effort to quell communal violence in the turbulent northeast. The rationale is that inflammatory online content has fanned tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in states including Assam, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra, contributing to a mass exodus from the region and violence in other cities. The offending content included fabricated images of violence against Muslims, apparently circulated to incite retaliatory attacks, according to news reports.

On International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, NfR Sri Lanka which is a network of Sri Lankan journalists and human rights defenders joins hands on this Day with all the people who love democracy and human rights by registering its condemnation of the continuance of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka with impunity. Over the past four decades successive governments in Sri Lankan have used enforced disappearances as a tool to suppress legitimate dissent and as a method of fighting internal armed conflicts.

The number of people displaced by ethnic violence in Assam since July 20 is about to cross the 5-lakh mark, making this India’s largest internal migration, comparable to the cross-border influx during Partition or the Bangladesh War. Thousands of people from the Northeast who migrated to mainland cities, especially Bangalore, have fled in panic to their home states. This speaks of colossal callousness within the mainstream towards a region that every government and every national party claims belongs irrevocably to India, even more integrally and organically than Jammu and Kashmir. Few in mainland India comprehend the absurdity of claiming such territorial ownership when they exhort the Northeast’s people to become “confident citizens” of the nation while minimising the injustices, violence and bloodshed heaped upon them, not least through draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives impunity for outright murder of anyone merely suspected of intention to infringe a routine prohibitory order.