South Asia Citizens Web

Meena Kandasamy has become the target of a vicious abuse campaign on twitter and other sites for her support to the festival during which she and other students had to be escorted to a safe place under police escort. Protestors even stoned the van they were travelling in. It is highly condemnable that her support of a food festival should lead to demands for her prosecution and a bounty on her head.

Centenaries are useful occasions for reflection and understanding. In the case of someone as contentious as Saadat Hasan Manto, his hundredth birth anniversary, on May 11, offers an occasion to make amends. Of course, those who regard Manto as a writer of a “certain” sort of stories would do well to study his oeuvre to understand its range and complexity. But, more importantly, those forces and those writers’ blocs — now diminished and depleted — which marginalised and mocked Manto during his lifetime can redress an old wrong. I am referring to the influential group of writers called the “progressives”, who had established the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 and in the years leading up to Partition set themselves up as a controlling authoritarian body.

on how manufacturing riots has become an industry in India

The governments of India and Pakistan must address human rights issues relating to each other’s prisoners, jailed in the other country. It is pertinent to remind the governments of their own decision to constitute the Joint Judicial Commission in 2007, comprising four retired judges of the superior courts of each country, which was expected to resolve expeditiously all problems pertaining to prisoners. Unfortunately, this has been undermined by either not allowing the commission to meet frequently or by not implementing the commission’s recommendations. Unanimous recommendations for the release and welfare of prisoners of the two countries still await implementation. If India and Pakistan abide by the recommendations of this commission, almost all problems of the prisoners will be resolved and they will be saved from unnecessary agony.

The involvement of women in anti-war actions and in support of peace activism worldwide is a critical part of modern history, yet the vulnerability of women in conflict situations to violence of all forms is perhaps the most brutal manifestation of patriarchy in modern times. We must probe the areas of ambivalence in women’s activism for peace and human rights, argues Sunila Abeysekera