South Asia Citizens Web

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 (…)

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 (…)

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, (…)

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 (…)

Kashmir Times, 4 November 2008
Pre-empting electoral verdict Administrative high-handedness smacks of political partisanship
Even in sham democracies, of which there is no dearth across the globe, elections are planned and conducted with specific objectives-stated as well as unstated. The validity and purposefulness of these objectives is taken for granted both, positively by those who expect to benefit from the elections and negatively by those at the other end of the divide. However, (…)