South Asia Citizens Web

Soni Sori, an adivasi school teacher and warden from Chhattisgarh, is currently facing trial in Chhattisgarh. 200 citizens including eminent citizens and 69 civil society groups and organisations have written to the supreme court of India to protect ’to insulate this victim of
custodial sexual assault from her oppressors, ensure her protection after she has spoken out about this torture despite threats to her person and family’

The month of January [2012] has been a nose dive for the civil liberties in the country. First, some social sites have got court notice for hosting content that the government and some petty groups deem objectionable. Secondly Author of book Satanic Verse, Salman Rushdie was told informally by the government that as some people are objecting to his visit to his home country, therefore he should cancel his visit to the Jaipur Literary Festival.

The time has come for Indian secular-democrats to assert the case for a better universe: a universe built around citizenship and rights, not the pernicious identity politics the state and its holy allies encourage.

In Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Iff tells Haroun how certain things are P2C2E, (process-too-complicated-to-explain). But this process is simple: politicians and clerics gain by keeping the population uninformed. They fight chimeric battles and offer illusory benefits to Muslims, who want education and jobs. Instead they get quotas, and not skills, with the added bonus: to protest Rushdie.

In recent years, the media has covered a number of incidents of intimate partner or domestic violence, which is a common occurrence in Bangladesh.