South Asia Citizens Web

The UID project envisages recording ten finger prints and iris scan of all people residing in India, allocating a unique number to each individual whose biometric data is captured, and storing it in a database with other basic information such as: name, parent’s name, date of birth, gender, and address. Clearly, the UID project will affect everyone residing in India. To ensure proper implementation it is important to carry out a detailed study of the project’s viability and feasibility. That the project has been launched without such a study is a matter of grave concern.

For Shamim Ahmad, it has been an arduous battle spanning more than a decade. A retired state government employee, Ahmad, based in Kanpur, hopes that he will soon get back what “rightfully belongs to him” — a double-storeyed, sea-facing building in Mumbai’s Worli area. The building is currently vested in the Custodian of Enemy Property in India under the provisions of the Enemy Property Act, 1968, promulgated in the country following the war with Pakistan in 1965.

THE devastating floods in Pakistan have once again ignited public debate [ . . . ] in the country. A closer analysis of the present flood and flood-related events experienced at/around Taunsa barrage furnishes us with some counter-intuitive, and indeed, scandalous evidence: the very structures meant to control flooding have partially caused and definitely exacerbated the flood problem itself.

Vibhuti Narayan Rai, a retired Indian Police Service officer who is currently the Vice-Chancellor of India’s only Hindi university, the Mahatma Gandhi International University at Wardha in Maharashtra, has created a furore in the world of Hindi writing. In a recent interview in Naya Gyanodaya, a Hindi magazine run by the Bharatiya Jnanpith Trust (the body that awards the Jnanpith award annually for the best literary writing in Indian languages), he lashed out at the trend of frank autobiographical writing by Hindi women writers. Using astoundingly crude words, Mr. Rai rubbished some best-selling woman authors in words that conveyed the image of sex-hungry women with loose moral values competing against each other in recording graphic details of their promiscuity in order to attract attention to their writings. It was, he said, as though there was a veritable festival of pornographic writing by women in Hindi.

Political control of intelligence is an important challenge for ‘mature’ as well emerging democracies.

The bloated body of work on democracy in South Asia has yet to identify, let alone come to terms with, this problem. A tentative beginning can be made by drawing on the central questions thrown up by the voluminous literature on civil-military relations.