South Asia Citizens Web

Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) has published a report on civilian conflict losses in northwest Pakistan, providing the views of victims, and warring parties’ efforts to address their losses.

The Ayodhya judgement attempts a political solution and leaves the law vulnerable

It’s not about Rama. It’s not about Babur. It’s not even about a temple or a mosque. It’s about an assault of a kind we’ve never seen before, on history, law and the truth.

The Commonwealth Games has come to a resounding close. What
memories, present conditions, and future possibilities does it leave behind?
These games have little to do with ’sports’ or with ’pride’. They are part of an economic strategy that is promoted to serve big financial interests through a programme of urban renewal along with advertising and marketing revenues. The Games never pay for themselves; it is public money that falls into the hands of private businessmen. Developers, real estate agents, construction companies, and people at the high end of the tourism, advertising, marketing, and hospitality industries rake in profits, while the rest of the citizens bear the debts and the social and environmental
impacts – repression, displacement, workers’ deaths, corruption, and degeneration – for years to come.

“A spectre is haunting South Asia—the spectre of Maoism,” the Financial Times rather melodramatically announced in April 2006, reporting that the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had described Maoist guerrillas as “the single greatest threat to Indian national security”.1 The scale of the Maoist-led insurgency in rural India has surprised and alarmed ruling classes for whom Marxism-Leninism was supposed to have been safely confined to the dustbin of history after 1989. The Indian Maoists have also become a subject of discussion on the left both in India and internationally. In particular, a recent article by the writer and campaigner Arundhati Roy describing her visit to a Maoist-controlled area attracted much controversy.2

In the following piece, the Indian Marxist scholar and activist Jairus Banaji offers a much more critical analysis of Indian Maoism than Roy provided.

Five years ago, when the proposed National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was a subject of fierce controversy, Bunker Roy compared the attitude of the government to that of a dog who crosses a road half-way, can’t decide whether to go forward or backward, and gets run over. This enlightening image applies again today, in the context of the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA).