South Asia Citizens Web

[A. K. Ramanujan] . . . was such an acclaimed linguist, folklorist and translator of all things Indian, forever opening doors to the interplay between the epic and everyday experience, who was recently shunned as an “untouchable” by the academic caste panchayat of Delhi University. [ . . . ] The role played by the Oxford University Press (OUP) in the three-year long saga ending with the burial of Ramanujan’s Ramayana piece illustrates how the world out there has come to unthinkingly push artefacts of the mind out of public spaces.

We urge the government to go ahead with a transparent and democratic review of the Koodankulam nuclear power project. We also urge the nuclear establishment to desist from scuttling such process by going to media with misleading and irrelevant claims.

The protest movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is very clear about what it is against - an international capitalism that is cruel, unfair and untenable. But the movement refuses to say what it is for. Much of this refusal comes from a belief that modern capitalist society is extremely skilful at co-opting dissent and that any discussion with the media is the first step in being reabsorbed into ’the system’.

For the world’s largest democracy, India is alarmingly quick to ban or censor books, artworks and films. Usually, the charge in legal parlance is “injury” to the “sentiments” of a community or group, often on grounds of religious belief.

The political economy of Sri Lanka has historically been constituted by global developments and this continues to be so in the current era. And the Rajapaksa regime has to be understood as a bloc of forces from the hardened nationalists to the neoliberal right. Here, the first term of the Rajapaksa Presidency, from 2005 to 2009, capitalised on the global "war on terror", and with the support of many international actors, ended the civil war and radically changed the political landscape of the country. The second term of the Rajapaksa Presidency, beginning in 2010, is now radically transforming the economic landscape, through a second wave of neoliberal reforms with considerable accumulation of wealth for few actors in the short run and the possibility of a serious economic crisis looming ahead.