South Asia Citizens Web

Today, the right to live one’s desire stands fragile and threatened. To love across caste, religion, region, language, community and gender is often just as dangerous for those desiring people of the opposite sex. From khap panchayats and the ridiculously named ‘honour killings’ to the everyday violence of how we separate from each other on caste, religious and class lines, the policing and criminalising of desire is one of the most powerful yet unseen ways in which inequality and injustice are maintained in our society. Unlike other, more familiar forms of exclusion, however, discrimination on the basis of sexuality is often trivialised, reduced to something ‘private’, dismissed as something ‘elite’, or confined to the lower rungs in hierarchies of grief in the real battles of poverty, work, violence and hunger.

fascination for violence in the saffron parivar seems to have reached its pinnacle with the phenomenon of Hindutva terror. It has been more than a decade that this phenomenon has raised its head which saw many avoidable deaths. Here we witness activists, workers, Pracharaks of the ’cause’ collecting arms, storing explosives, engaging themselves in arms training and making elaborate plans to put it at crowded places to have maximum impact. One finds them putting the explosives in larger religious congregations, in crowded trains or in busy areas to teach the ’others’ a lesson.We also witness the cowardice exhibited during many such operations by them where the conspirators camouflaged themselves as the ’other’ to further stigmatise the other community. As things stand today n number of workers of different Hindutva formations have been apprehended, cases have been registered, investigations are on.

Sunil Janah, the photographer whose searing coverage of the Bengal Famine and vivid political portraiture of the 1940s and 1950s helped chronicle a tumultuous era in the life of India, passed away at his home in Berkeley, California on June 21. He was 94 years old.

Lahore, June 29: The killing of Shia pilgrims in Balochistan on Thursday again demonstrates that terrorists persist with their vicious and systematic campaign to target citizens on account of their religious beliefs as state has either been unwilling or increasingly unable to prevent the blatant killings, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has said.

A discussion on a cartoon on Ambedkar in a NCERT textbook in India and its political fallout