South Asia Citizens Web

Photos of the New Delhi Protest Rally of June 2, 2010 in Solidarity with Palestinians

the text of a notice demanding justice issued today (3 June 2010) by Moin Ghani Barrister on behalf of four lawyers and law students, challenging the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commissions blocking of Facebook on the purported ground of defamation of ‘national and spiritual leaders’ and of hurting religious sentiment, and also challenging certain provisions of the Information Technology Act 2006 as being violations of the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, to be treated in accordance with law and to freedom of assembly and protection of correspondence.

Tackling the terrorists who kill almost at will isn´t the only job at hand. The
culture of intolerance has become ingrained in Pakistan and wide-ranging
measures are required to change our collective mindset. Textbooks need to
be revised and the perils of both brazen and covert narrow-mindedness must be publicly debated. It would also help if major religious parties came forward to condemn atrocities such as Friday´s attacks on Ahmadis in Lahore. But that is perhaps asking for too much.

Thanks to the maliciously tempered history taught to us of Islam and Pakistan in our schools and colleges, I have noticed that very few young Pakistanis have any ability left in them to question (in an informed manner) what is dished to them by the courts, the state, the clerics and the televangelists as ‘Islam’ and ‘nationalism.’

In the homes of the ‘high-born’, in India’s caste-ridden society, the much-loved daughter turns into something too dangerous to live, if her sexuality slips out of the structures of feudal control. Babu Bajrangi, the Sangh Parivar leader from Gujarat, who boasts of having ‘rescued’ (i.e abducted) a 1000 Hindu women who dared to marry Muslim or ‘lower’ caste men, says that every daughter (beti) is a bomb that threatens to blow up caste society. The daughter’s body is, literally, the porous border of caste purity – and must be policed carefully to prevent infiltration. The daughter’s act of choosing her own partner causes terror in the custodians of caste society. No wonder she is compared to a ‘bomb’! Incidentally and interestingly, it is ironic to see participants in the debate over the caste census argue that ideally, caste should be done away with ‘except in matters of marriage’! Is it really possible that they fail to realise that marriage and the control of female sexuality thereby is central to the maintenance of the caste system, and that we cannot claim to have rendered caste irrelevant until caste is done away with in matters of marriage?!