Archive of South Asia Citizens Wire

  • 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, (…)

  • Dont Let Hawks Hijack Foreign Policy

    by Sanjib Baruah, 4 November 2008

    Indian Express, November 4, 2008
    Don’t blame the neighbours
    : Foreign policy can figure prominently in the political calculations of terrorist groups. For instance, train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004 were cleverly timed to influence the Spanish elections. The Socialist party won an upset victory in the elections three days later, and replaced the Government of José María Aznar, and the new Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero kept his election promise of pulling (…)

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