Archive of South Asia Citizens Wire

  • “It is a mistake to equate the demand for Pakistan with the partition of India”

    by Shoma Chaudhury, 11 September 2009

    From Tehelka (September 2009)
    What strikes you, personally, as the sharpest irony of the Jinnah- Jaswant Singh controversy and its fallout in India?
    What strikes me as most ironic is the extent to which the ’’’secular’ Congress and the ’communal’ BJP end up subscribing to the same common idioms of Indian nationalism when it comes to Pakistan and its most potent symbol, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
    Jinnah of the 1916 Lucknow Pact where Sarojini Naidu hailed him as the “ambassador of (…)

  • Revisiting 1947 through Popular Cinema: A Comparative Study of India and Pakistan

    by Gita Viswanath, Salma Malik, 11 September 2009

    The memorialisation of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 through popular cinema is the theme of this paper. Both in India and Pakistan, cinema as a cultural production wields immense influence in the lives of the people and mainstream cinema has been deeply affected by Partition. By offering the potential for public mourning in a public space such as a theatre, cinema confronts the trauma of that cataclysmic event and Partition cinema in particular invests heavily in the private sphere of emotions and familial relations while also demonstrating that the private domain is already political.

  • Pakistan: Religion cannot be used or allowed to justify murder

    by Beena Sarwar, 9 September 2009

    Since the option of life imprisonment under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code ("Use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet"), the `blasphemy law’, introduced by Gen. Ziaul Haq in 1985 was amended by default in 1992 to make death the mandatory punishment for anyone convicted under this law. Certainly, the law does not provide for these extra-judicial murders. However, it is equally true no such murder took place until death was made the mandatory punishment for 295-C convictions in Pakistan.

  • Publish and Be Damned in India

    by Rajeev Dhavan, 7 September 2009

    India needs statutory safeguards against the colonial- era powers that the states have to ban books

  • ’Encounter Killings’ and the Question of Justice in India

    by Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisations (CDRO), 6 September 2009

    CDRO Press Release on Encounters
    5 September 2009
    Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisations (CDRO)
    Association for Democratic Rights (AFDR, Punjab), Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR, West Bengal), Bandhi Mukti Morcha (West Bengal), Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR, Nagpur), Coordination for Human Rights (COHR, Manipur), Human Rights Forum (HRF, Andhra), Lokshahi Hak Sangathana (LHS, (…)

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