South Asia Citizens Web

We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned at the recent developments of accusing POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS), the organization spearheading a peaceful, democratic movement for more than five years against forceful land acquisition for the proposed POSCO project in Odisha, for ‘using’ children as shields in the movement. We believe that the allegations and accusations against PPSS is an attempt to diffuse the focus of the peoples’ struggle and make a nuisance about an issue that does not hold any truth.

Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow.

Report on Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) struggle for Conservation and Protection of Mangrove Forests.

In the passing of MF Hussain, there is more to be mourned than the death of an Indian artist in exile. Nor is this terminal condition confined to India.

Aung San Suu Kyi discusses what freedom means in the first of her 2011 Reith Lectures, entitled Liberty. The Burmese pro-democracy leader reflects on her own experience under house arrest in Burma, exploring the universal human aspiration to be free and the spirit which drives people to dissent. She also comments on the Arab Spring, comparing the event that triggered last December’s revolution in Tunisia with the death of a student during a protest in Burma in 1988.