South Asia Citizens Web

In the wake of ongoing controversy on the justification of death penalty, it is high time that Parliament takes appropriate steps to abolish such provision from our statue books. The provision of Death Penalty had been introduced by the British in the Indian Penal Code in 1860 but the same has itself been abolished by the British from their own statue books- being incompatible with the values of a civilized society, as done by large number of other countries.

The year 2010 was the first full year since Sri Lanka emerged from almost three decades of civil war, following the decisive military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the preceding May. The island continued to be governed under an island-wide state of emergency, only partially modified in the course of the year, while the Prevention of Terrorism Act that falls far short of international human rights standards was neither re- pealed nor amended.

The people of Koodankulam, Idinthakarai and other neighboring villages decide to withdraw from the ongoing “peace” process and resume their peaceful, nonviolent Gandhian satyagraha by holding a massive hunger strike on September 11, 2011 at Idinthakarai in Tirunelveli district [in Tamil Nadu, India] to demand of closing down the Koodankulam nuclear power plants.

The lack of academic debate over the role and place of religion, Islamist politics and secularism in our society, has created an intellectual vacuum in Pakistan. This has recently been filled in by a spate of post-9/11 scholarship by Muslim diasporics working on such themes.