South Asia Citizens Web

reconciliation is something we desperately need to learn. Vast areas in the sub-continent have remained under martial law for decades. The number of orphans in the Kashmir valley run into the tens of thousands. Violence and terror have acquired a seamless trajectory. Communal and ethnic hatreds lurk beneath the surface of everyday life. The glorification of “masculine” virtue is a national pastime. And yet we Indians prefer to cling to our favourite symbolised grievances than to take the smallest steps towards comprehension and resolution.

As a developing nation, can we afford to waste time in satsangs, asks Khushwant Singh. It can scarcely be disputed that we Indians - be we Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or Parsis - spend more time in performing religious rituals than any other people in the world.

The People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) welcomes the statement of the Central Government’s Experts Group (EG) convener, Dr. A.E. Muthunayagam, that expresses the group’s willingness to hold discussions with the scientific team of the PMANE.

The story recurs, again and again. State granaries are full, the economy is resurgent and many of the world’s wealthiest people are Indians. Yet grain rots, while one in every two Indian children is unable to access enough food for her body and brain to develop to her full potential. It rots
while millions are compelled to subsist for long periods without sufficient food, cutting back on their food intakes, sometimes reduced to eating one meal a day; or to beg for food; or to eat tubers, grasses and mango kernels that fill their stomachs but provide no nutrition; or sometimes just to drink the starch water left over after cooking rice, which their neighbours give them in tight-fisted charity.

The unraveling of the Ishrat Jahan case last week came close on the heels of the convictions for the Sardarpura massacre, the first of the eight post-Godhra riot cases being monitored by the Supreme Court. Narendra Modi’s legal troubles are not only for the carnage that took place on his watch in 2002 but also for the series of mysterious killings of those who had allegedly sought to take revenge on him or fallen out with him in the wake of the riots.