South Asia Citizens Web

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.

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.