South Asia Citizens Web

The News
The Pakhtun are caught up in one of the most difficult times of their history. The Taliban are aggressively attacking their lives, livelihoods, culture and history. Pakistan army, the defender of the frontiers of Pakistan, including the Pakhtun areas, is failing to protect them against the atrocities of the Taliban. Some influential outsiders continue to depict in media that the Pakhtun and Taliban are one and the same people. The outsiders have almost no or at best a superficial (…)

Dawn
BEFORE unidentified functionaries of the state barred them from staging their plays in India this week, Madeeha Gauhar and Sheema Kermani were facing the wrath of cultural vigilantes in their respective backyards in Pakistan.
Their torment was not unusual. Three Booker Prize winners from India — Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai — have found themselves in a similar quandary with their own zealots, including those claiming literary pretence. Is it because writers and (…)

The Telegraph
Principle of Exclusion
As Israel’s monstrous destruction of Gaza grinds on, Hamas becomes, by bloody default, the face of Palestinian resistance. Mahmoud Abbas, nominally the president of the Palestinian Authority, and the party he leads, Fatah, have begun to seem, fairly or otherwise, creatures of Israel and the West. At the very moment that Fatah, whose headquarters were bombed into rubble by Israel in the time of Yasser Arafat, is being hailed by Israel and America as (…)

sacw.net
In February 2008, Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai warned that if Hamas continued firing rockets, they would bring upon themselves a ’bigger shoah,’ the word used by Israelis to refer to the Nazi genocide or holocaust. This statement came in the wake of attacks on Gaza which left 32 Palestinians dead, including eight children, the youngest a six-month-old baby. These regular attacks, combined with a blockade which deprived Palestinians in Gaza of food, fuel, potable (…)

Press Release 13 January 2009 The success story of the two digit growth has masked the several digit realities of loss of livelihood, land acquisition, displacement and permanent loss of natural resources which are treated as free goods in this process. The investment figure without the displacement and depletion of natural resources figure and the employment figure without loss of livelihood does not make sense. – Rohit Prajapati and Dr. Trupti Shah No wise person would talk about the (…)