South Asia Citizens Web

For the last 9 months Humanists, Rationalists and Human Rights activists in India and Nepal have been fighting an elaborate reincarnation fraud in South India, enacted with connivance and encouragement from the Nobel Peace Laureate Dalai Lama. I am writing to report success but maybe I should first give the back ground to a complex story where Buddhist and Hindu superstition about rebirth, criminal intentions of parents to exploit their child for business as well real estate business and spiritual fraud and an international conspiracy to exploit a child for political and religious purposes are involved.

A book review of The God Market: How Globalisation Is Making India More Hindu by Meera Nanda; Random House India.

It is the face of the Bhopal gas tragedy. The photograph of an unnamed child, barely out of infancy, looking out with an unrelenting gaze upon the world from the soil of a newly dug grave, was taken soon after the gas leak from the Union Carbide factory. It continues to symbolise the incalculable human cost of the world’s worst industrial calamity. Today, a full 25 years later, another generation of children, born to parents from the gas-affected, poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of the city, continue to bear the footprint of that fateful night when a cloud of deadly methyl isocyanate enshrouded the area.

The norms and rules of civil decorum in the National Assembly of Pakistan (NA) seem to have been compromised on Friday. Unfortunately irrationality reared its ugly head on the fourth day of the Assembly’s budget debate. Maulvi Asmatullah — recently separated from the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) — shocked many during Assembly proceedings by loudly reciting the azaan from his desk whilst facing the chair rather than the Kaaba.

A daylong People’s Convention on IDPs, Detainees and War Crimes in Sri Lanka was held in New Delhi on June 7, 2010 just before Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse’s visit to India beginning June 8. It was jointly organised by several organisations and institutions. The Convention adopted a Statement on the Sri Lankan Situation (alongwith a Roadmap for Dignified Resettlement, Reconcilliation and Durable Political Solution in Sri Lanka that was incorporated as an annexure to the Statement).