South Asia Citizens Web

Her circumstances are many times more adverse. Perhaps that is why in her fight for justice Zakia Jaafri outshines the four heroic American women of 9/11 who became known as the Jersey widows.

. . . This is my 24th year in the IPS. I was allotted to the Gujarat cadre during a time when the State was passing through the throes of widespread and sporadic communal violence. Having been baptised by fire, I have been since trying to understand and deal with the likes of you, who deal in the divisive politics of hatred. It is my well founded observation that the polity of Gujarat has now crossed the stage where communal violence can accrue electoral benefits to any political party, as the process of communal polarisation is very nearly complete in Gujarat. The experiments in the divisive politics of hatred have been very successful in the Gujarat Laboratory. . . .

After Fukushima, it’s natural and pertinent to ask if nuclear power has a future anywhere, including India. But whatever the future or present, Srikumar Banerjee [a top official of India’s atomic energy establishment] will surely find a place in the past for declaring on April 14 [2011] that the unfolding multi-reactor Fuk­ushima me­ltdown was “purely a chemical reaction”, not a nuclear emergency.

The NIA has finally put the official seal on what many activists, the families of the accused and the people of Malegaon had been saying for long: that the arrest of nine Muslim men for the 2008 Malegaon blast was a result of a communal witch-hunt, which passes for investigations into terror charges. As a consequence of the investigating agencies’ hubris and prejudice, nine innocent men had to spend five long years in jail, while their families suffered and they were stigmatized.

A draft national broadcasting policy has barred private television channels, radios and Internet protocol TVs from broadcasting any program making derogatory comments about national figures like Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a high official said yesterday. The draft also forbids programs that may pose threat to national security and sovereignty and may seem satirical to national ideology, said the Information Ministry official speaking on condition of anonymity.