South Asia Citizens Web

The Gujarat Earthquake in the year 2001 and the consequent relief and rehabilitation programme was an eyeopener to the outside world regarding the deep seated caste bias in the Gujarati community apart from the much talked about bias against the minorities. There were reports that at places the relief and rehabilitation work bypassed the dalits and the Muslims.
The organised genocide of Muslims in the year 2002 at the behest of the Sangh Parivar organisations which was aided and (…)

Making Contact from National Radio Project
February 4, 2009
Transcript #05-09 Conversation on Kashmir with Arundhati Roy and David Barsamian
Program description, guest contact information and audio files at [http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2009/0509.html >http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2009/0509.html]
Arundhati Roy is the celebrated author of “The God of Small Things” and winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. “The New York Times” calls her, "India’s most impassioned critic (…)

’there’s a lot of money in poverty’. Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic beach, god-given, not man-made.

One fateful day in 1991 Ronjha and his crew were arrested by men of the Indian maritime security agency — men they had until then thought to be their compatriots. Engaged in a childish tit for tat game, Pakistan and India are punishing innocent, largely poor and marginalised fisher folks of their countries. Sadly, it is Pakistan that is more in the wrong for having detained and released over two thousand Indian fishermen between the years 2005 to 2008. India, on the other hand, took only five hundred. As of the end of last year, there were thirty-nine Pakistani fishermen in Indian jails as against three hundred and fifty-six of their counterparts in Pakistan.

In an important court ruling by the US Federal judge on 25 february 2009, Hindutva’s politically motivated efforts to change the contents of school textbooks in California are scuttled.