South Asia Citizens Web

The Burmese army soon felt the need to legitimise its undemocratic rule and one rather secure way of achieving it is to approach the divine – bribe religious institutions and buy their blessings. The Burmese military gave, and still does, hefty donations to monasteries, builds pagodas (with lots of gold) and organises and celebrates religious ceremonies at state level. The top government functionaries are not only religious; they make sure that they are seen to be so – believing that it makes them legitimate in people’s eyes. I am sure this surprises no one in Pakistan where starting from later part of ZA Bhutto’s government successive rulers have competed in raising their Islamic credentials.

Talking to a community of people through the limited lens of religion is at best, ill-conceived and at worst, dangerous. It privileges certain kinds of voices within the community over others, who then go on to call the shots and seek to determine socio-political trajectories and limit the possible futures of the community. The Mussalman in Bengal is not only a Mussalman — he/she has aspirations not quite different from other inhabitants of Bengal, lives much more in the world of Bengali than in the world of Arabic, spends much of the day not praying, not in the mosque, not thinking about afterlife.

The aggravated sexual assault on a woman in Guwahati, wrongly termed “molestation”, exposed the colossal insensitivity and gender bias that pervades the administration, the police, the media and even institutions specifically created to protect women’s rights like the National Commission on Women (NCW)

the notification of the draconian Essential Services Maintenance Act 2011, virtually imposing a total ban on the right to strike following the presidential assent to the bill passed by the Maharashtra legislature.

Lahore, August 10: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed alarm and a strong sense of outrage at the continued exodus of religious minority communities from Sindh and Balochistan and said that the state has consistently failed to allay the concerns of these communities despite repeated reminders by the civil society.