Archive of South Asia Citizens Wire

  • Chhattisgarh: Where Journalists get paid to keep their mouths shut

    by Shubhranshu Choudhary, 7 April 2009

    The Art of Not Writing
    March 31, 2009 How does the media in Chhattisgarh report the conflict between the Naxalites and the Salwa Judum, or the conflict between local communities and corporations? Quite simply, it doesn’t. The pressures on journalists in Chhattisgarh are unique. They are paid not to report stories that are critical of the powers that be, whether they are industrial lobbies or state authorities. Shubhranshu Choudhary writes. I was in Bhairamgarh to cover a Salwa Judum (…)

  • India: PV Indiresan Committee Report on Electronic Voting Machines (September 2006)

    by sacw.net, 5 April 2009

  • Lessons from an Indian jail

    by Priyamvada Gopal, 3 April 2009

    For two years now, Dr Binayak Sen, an award-winning physician and civil rights activist practising in the Indian state of Chattisgarh, a resource-rich yet economically deprived region, has been rotting in prison. The charges levelled at him by the state are flimsy and the evidence even thinner. Caught, like other Chattisgarhis, in a virtual civil war between Naxalites, Maoist-inspired militants and a state-backed vigilante paramilitary known as the Salwa Judum, Sen has been accused in vaguely speculative terms of supporting the former. The case drags on with neither credible evidence on offer nor a determinate end in sight.

  • India: What are the secular credentials of different political parties?

    by Ram Puniyani, 1 April 2009

    Electoral Parties and Secular Values
    In our secular democracy how to we choose whom to vote for. What are the secular credentials of different political parties in the electoral arena? The lead party of ruling coalition, UPA, Congress is no clean body as its hands are also full of blood of Sikhs in the 1984. Large numbers of communal riots have taken place during Congress regimes. BJP is the ally of organizations which spew poison against minorities and its role in Babri demolition, (…)

  • "These are concentration camps, not refugee camps”

    by John Dayal, 1 April 2009

    31 March 09
    Camp and Culpability
    It was almost a year ago. In Barakhama’s village-town in Kandhamal district on March 19, 2008, the death of an old Catholic woman in the local refugee camp for want of adequate medicare, and prohibitory orders banning outsiders from meeting the Christian refugees because of a buffalo sacrifice festival in the grounds close by, marked a tense and troubled Holy Week in Orissa. Despite the elections, more than 3,000 Central Reserve police Force and state (…)

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