South Asia Citizens Web

The three-in-one disaster at Fukushima has stirred human consciousness all over the world. On the one hand, it has prompted Germany’s decision of phasing out nuclear energy by the year 2022, Italians’ overwhelming vote against nuclear power in a national referendum, and some 20,000 Swiss citizens’ rallying against nuclear power and so forth. On the other hand, Fukushima has evoked a totally different and horrendous response from other quarters. India is a case in point.

It has now been confirmed that the Anna Hazare-led so-called ‘second freedom struggle’—as some sections of the media have mistakenly chosen to call it—has close links with the RSS. From conceptualizing this media-propelled movement to successfully organizing it, the RSS, it appears, played a key role in it. This being the case, it is imperative to analyse the specific communal character of this self-styled Gandhian movement against corruption.

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.