South Asia Citizens Web

It is also wrong to assume that all upper caste Hindus are anti-Muslim. It is extremists among dalits who maintain that all Brahmins are against Muslims and they conspire to establish a Hindu Rashtra. Some may be of such views and indeed are. But a sweeping generalization in this respect would be a fatal mistake. There are several Brahmin politicians and officers who are quite secular and sympathise with the plight of Muslims. On the other hand, there are several dalit and OBC politicians who do not hesitate for a moment to join hands with communal forces to serve their own interests casting away Ambedkar’s ideology.

Governments are not elected to dictate religious doctrine to its people. We elect our legislators to run the state. We elect legislators to make the decisions we cannot. What they are not expected to do is to propagate and literally shove down everybody’s throats, religious doctrine. The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is doing just that with an intensity which is not only overbearing but plain dogmatic and stupid.

The BBC marked the death of MF Husain last Thursday by giving a Mayfair gallery curator a 30-second soundbite to describe one of the best artists of our time. The best tribute Britain could give Husain would be for the Royal Academy to organise a major retrospective of his art and include in the exhibition the supposedly offensive works, so viewers can realise how confected the charges of his accusers were. For that to happen, the police would need to break with precedent and promise to protect freedom of expression from its enemies. Politicians and cultural commentators would need to go further and find the courage to spit out a commitment to a simple principle: in free societies, artists have the right to paint what they damn well want and citizens have the right to look at what they damn well want.

The report by a UN panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka found credible allegations of war crimes as having been committed by both the Sri Lankan government’s armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at the end of the civil war between September 2008 and May 2009. Predictably, reactions from both the government as well as the LTTE’s supporters have been of denial or a selective acceptance of the report. The strength of the UN panel report is that it provides an authoritative account of what happened at the end of the war, but does not focus on war crimes alone.

Students in Britain have protested vociferously against government cuts in education funding, and rightly so. But students in Sri Lanka, where state-funded higher education is also under attack, face an additional ordeal: compulsory "leadership and positive attitude development" of university entrants by the military. The scheme was introduced without warning by the ministry of higher education, and is being carried out by the ministry of defence. The purpose of the programme seems to be to reproduce the authoritarian, militaristic, Sinhala nationalist vision of society that characterises the Rajapaksa regime. Even if this goal is not achieved, the "skills" imparted by an army that has perpetrated horrific war crimes could, in a country awash with weapons, spawn armed robbery and gang warfare as well as state and anti-state terrorism.