South Asia Citizens Web

War, conflict and peace are states which cannot be abruptly demarcated. War creates its own vestiges and the creation of a war economy is one of them; it helps to sustain conflicts since certain powerful vested interest groups are created by it. More than two decades of insurgency, which followed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination on August 15, 1975 and continued till the signing of the peace accord on December 2, 1997, has led to the creation of a vested interest group in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
The region has allegedly become a conduit point for small arms and drugs. Jummas (hill people) allege that Bengali security personnel along with civil officials were involved in the extraction of forest resources. The military officials however, deny the involvement of the military in such activities, but concede that a certain degree of pilferage of resources might have taken place.

The feminist critique of religion should not appease the strident voices which label secularism as fundamentalist or militant by promoting a secularism that has had its teeth drawn. Feminists must continue to argue for a robust secularism and the right to stand against religion, argues Rahila Gupta

Pakistan’s state apparatus, for all its tanks and guns, offers no protection to those deemed as religious minorities. Is it just weakness? Or, perhaps, complicity? While swarms of intelligence agents can be seen in many places, they fail spectacularly to intercept religious terrorists. More ominously, recent months have seen state-sanctioned Difah-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) rallies across the country, drawing many tens of thousands. Prominent self-proclaimed Shia and Ahmadi killers, prance on stage while holding hands in a show of unity.

Women are subordinate to men, should not mix in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel, according to new guidelines from Afghanistan’s top clerics which critics say are dangerously reminiscent of the Taliban era.

We are dismayed and pained at the government’s campaign of vilification of the sustained popular movement against the Koodankulam nuclear plant, which has raised vital issues of atomic safety. These issues have assumed pivotal importance worldwide after the Fukushima disaster, the world’s first multiple-reactor meltdown. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has trivialised the movement, and the five months-long relay fast by thousands of people, by attributing it to “the foreign hand”, or Western non-governmental organisations, without citing even remotely credible evidence.