South Asia Citizens Web

Given its long history and striking architecture, it is no wonder that Timbuktu has been named a Unesco world heritage site. Sadly, this distinction has not stopped thugs of the Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, from destroying and damaging a number of ancient mosques and mausoleums.

On Wednesday, 4th of July, a frenzied mob broke into a police station in Bahawalpur (South Punjab). The mob’s target was a ’malang’ (vagabond), the sort that have been found in and around numerous shrines of Sufi saints in the sub-continent for centuries.

Petition
To the US Secretary of State, UK Secretary of State for International
Development and the Foreign Ministers of Germany, Japan and Italy:

As concerned citizens across the world, we call on you to ensure strong guarantees for the protection of women´s rights in your pledge to provide aid to the Afghan government. We urge you to ensure that any financial aid to Afghanistan is conditioned on an end to the blatant impunity that has resulted in the rape, abduction and torture of Lal Bibi by the Afghan Local Police. Afghan officials must immediately bring her rapists to justice and work to protect women across Afghanistan.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/justice_for_lal_bibi_c/?bSvMibb&v=15757

In the last two decades, spaces for fun in public have been shrinking. Over the years in Mumbai the police have, at various intervals, rounded up couples on the streets and threatened to fine them or inform their parents. Not just couples, even people simply hanging out in public having a good time, especially at night, are suspect. Spaces of protest have been reduced to pretty much just Azad Maidan. The quest for the global city has also been one to move people from the streets to consumption spaces, marking off those who can pay to have fun from those who can’t. But even these spaces are not entirely unthreatened.

For two years now, thousands of nurses working in corporate hospitals across the country have been participating in demonstrations and strikes, protesting the fact that hospital managements – often alleged to have illegal connections with politicians and bureaucrats – blatantly flout the country’s labour laws.