South Asia Citizens Web

We sincerely hope that the Government of India would take appropriate steps to implement the directions of the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Bhopal, dated 22 July 2009 to seek extradition of accused No.1, Warren Anderson, from the United States of America to stand trial in the court of the CJM even at this late stage.

Why is democracy not suited to Pakistan, or why are Pakistanis not suited to democracy? It is really a circular argument and leads nowhere. The leftists and centrists today ask why be satisfied with the partial democracy of today? Why not have more democracy? As I.A. Rehman put it: if democracy is defective today, pour in more democracy; make the dispersal of power so widespread that at least two or three lac people feel threatened by the demise of democracy. They will not let that happen.

Discussions of sexuality in India invariably centre on India’s ‘ancient’ past where public expressions of sexuality were not taboo. This is the Kama Sutra narrative that is a product of colonial history, nationalist aspirations and European theorising about a ‘free-flowing’ Orient that was different from a ‘repressed’ Occident. The Kama Sutra narrative of Indian sexuality is largely irrelevant to an understanding of its modern manifestations and is best confined to expensive coffee table books of our ‘glorious’ past that was supposedly destroyed by foreign invaders.

The collapse of the coffer dam for the 330 MW Alaknanda Hydro Power Project does not come as a surprise to serious observers of Uttarakhand’s hydropower development programme.