South Asia Citizens Web

Curfew orders have just been promulgated in our area once again right after our planning meetings with the youth, women, community elders and the Idinthakarai village committee on May 8, 2012. Thousands of police personnel are being posted in and around Koodankulam in haste. We get reliable tips that the authorities are planning to clamp down our protest and arrest all of us, possibly tonight. Such a pre-dawn operation that the government usually does could be bloody as thousands of men, women and children from several villages are sleeping around the Church at Idinthakarai.

It is an honour, comrades and friends, to be given an opportunity to participate as more than an observer in the unfolding histories of JANAM and LEFTWORD, histories that have been rich and complex, and which continue to be inspired by, even as they take forward the legacy of, among others, Safdar Hashmi’s progressive leftwing open-mindedness, non-sectarianism, compassion, boundless energy and creativity.

Police investigation of Sanal Edamaraku for debunking a “miracle” at a church is a crime against the Constitution.

n the Arab Gulf, the treatment of migrant labour – male as well as female – has long been a scandal. Men from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in the billionaires’ paradise of Kuwait – and are consistently harassed, treated as third-class citizens, and arrested on the meanest of charges.

For decades the textbooks used in Pakistan’s educational institutions, especially the ones used in the public sector, have drawn serious criticism from experts and concerned citizens. Besides being shoddily produced, the textbooks lack creativity and fail to stimulate a child’s imagination. The most serious charge against them is that the content, wholly or partially, is biased, selective and inculcates in the child a parochial and subjective outlook. The charge is primarily levelled against the textbooks for the disciplines of History, Pakistan Studies and Islamiat, but is not confined to these subjects. For the most part the content of these textbooks seeks to stem analytical thinking and follows what some have described as the “curriculum of hatred”. In addition to creating a sense of nationhood grounded in religion, these textbooks have served to entrench denominational thinking that leads to religious bigotry.