South Asia Citizens Web

A woman writer who won literary trophies in her twenties. An aged artist once known and loved for his bare-foot charm and innovative brush. Both are on the run today. And no force in the vast South Asian region, stretching from New Delhi to Dhaka, can help either return home in dignity.
Forty-five-year-old writer Taslima Nasreen is being kicked around like a football for a week now within India, where she sought asylum 13 years ago.

Forget the Jammu and Kashmir angle. Sentencing Afzal to death is wrong because the facts against him don?t add up, writes Sonia Jabbar.

Debates in Colonial and Early Nationalist Anthropology of Castes and Tribes
The beginning of the study of anthropology in the 19th century coincided with the need of the colonial authorities to ‘understand’ and assert themselves over their natives ubjects. New fields such as statistics came to be used to categorise and define subjects who were then placed in relation to each other in a fixed hierarchy. As this article argues, the tenor of the dominant anthropological discourse on the (…)

India seems bent on emulating some of the worst aspects of Chinese economic policy, notably Special economic zones (SEZs), which are duty-free and tax-free enclaves. To establish the SEZs, India’s state governments are procuring farmland in coercive ways, at prices well below the prevailing market rates, and handing it over to promoters - including big business groups such as the Ambani brothers, the South Korean steel giant POSCO, the Tatas, Mahindras, Unitech and Sahara. They stand to make huge super-profits.