Archive of South Asia Citizens Wire

  • The Kosi Disaster: Dont Forget the Survivors

    by Harsh Mander, 5 November 2008

    Hindustan Times, October 27, 2008
    A happy Diwali?
    The tragedy of Bihar — the devastation wrought because the mighty river Kosi changed course after it breached its embankment in Nepal on August 18 — has slipped off the pages of newspapers and TV screens. The calamity has also been virtually ignored by most international humanitarian aid agencies, and even national relief organisations. The people affected are among the most impoverished in this land, and floods seem to be part of the (…)

  • Hindutva Fundamentalists Mirroring Thier Counterparts

    by Jyoti Punwani, 5 November 2008

    The Times of India, 4 November 2008
    Aping each other
    The TV coverage of the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Thakur brought about a sense of deja vu. Where had we seen this before - a preacher being charged with a terrorist act? Then it struck home. Mullah Omar, Maulana Masood Azhar, the Lal Masjid mullahs... and nearer home, MuftiAbu Bashir, the imam of Mumbai’s Musafirkhana mosque, the maulvi arrested after the Ahmedabad blasts.
    One always suspected that the RSS was envious of Muslims. The (…)

  • Sangh parivar - the multi headed hydra of the Hindu right

    by Mustafa Khan, 4 November 2008

    We have failed to fully account for the role the so-called cultural organization RSS has played and is still playing in violent acts. Why does this need arise from time to time? It is primarily because the extreme right wing organization has meddled into politics of the country from time to time and by not recognizing Muslims as part of it. Or, as is its assertion from time to time that Muslims have to forgo their allegiance to the foreign faith they have embraced and be sanskritized. This (…)

  • The winter of our discontent: provincialism and terrorism

    by Mustafa Khan, 4 November 2008

    There is the winter of our discontent that has set in. The stock market is in doldrums, protests and violence in the streets, lynching and encounters in the financial capital of the country, war of words between states of the union, involvement of ex-servicemen and a serving lieutenant colonel in terrorism, the slide of the reputed Bhonsla military school of Nasik and Nagpur into the nadir of terrorism, and 25 bomb blasts in Assam, etc.
    It is dreadful to think what the situation would be (…)

  • Sweeping dissent under the carpet of ’normalcy’ in Kashmir

    by Sonia Jabbar, 4 November 2008

    Hindustan Times, November 4, 2008
    Not special, but equal
    A couple of weeks ago I stood by a bed in the ICU of a Srinagar hospital. Sixteen-year-old Zeeshan Puruzgar’s chest heaved like bellows. He had been shot through the liver the day before, at point blank range, by the Central Reserve Police Force during a demonstration. A few hours later I visited 14-year-old Waseem Ahmad Wani at another hospital. Half his face was swathed in bandages where the tear gas shell had hit him directly, (…)

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