South Asia Citizens Web

Maqbool Fida Husain was India’s most celebrated painter, and his death in London last week was front-page news across the subcontinent. However, toward the end of his life, Husain had trouble finding galleries willing to show his work. He lived in Dubai, Doha or London for most of the last two decades because he couldn’t paint in peace in his own country, even becoming a Qatari national last year. India will now try to claim Husain as a son of its soil. Someone will suggest issuing a postage stamp in his name. Others will talk about naming roads or art galleries after him. A more fitting tribute would be to revoke those provisions of Indian law that drove Husain out of the country. The next M.F. Husain should not have to curb his imagination or dream smaller dreams.

What’s going on in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is the story we Bangladeshis, or at least the majority ethnic Bengalis, don’t like to talk about too much. Our long record of suppression of indigenous rights and marginalisation of non-Bengali peoples is too shameful and does not mesh well with our national self-image as the eternal victim and the perpetually downtrodden.

India, especially its polity, equates its secularism with multi-communalisms in which the equilibrium keeps altering with the stridency of the assertion of self-assumed representation of one or the other community, even if all it takes is to mobilise some half a dozen to two dozen individuals on any occasion to lay such claim, with the media glare inflating their presence manifold.

Military and para-military forces as well as all civil law enforcement agencies must be compelled to respect, without exception, the rule of law and the paramount obligation to protect and respect people’s right to life and liberty. The time to end impunity and enforce accountability for undermining people’s right to security and peaceful existence is now! JAC believes that a transparent scrutiny by the Parliament of military budget and spending must be one step in the direction of restoring the state to the people of Pakistan.

The Ayodhya Judgment, based on the “Faith and belief of the Hindus”, has forsaken the established principles of law of evidence and cannot therefore be said to be based on a fair - trial.