South Asia Citizens Web

When a factory is locked out, the workers agitate. Soon the Government apparatus swings into action. A police picket appears in the vicinity. Maintenance of law and order seems to be the top priority. Weeks merge into months and by then the threat to law and order presumably subsides. Less and less of workers gather in front of the padlocked factory gates till only a handful are left behind. Things are back to ’normal’.

Buying Arms, Talking Peace
It is regrettable that India and Pakistan have made so little progress on the worthy proposal, now 14 months-old, to launch a bus service between the capitals of divided Kashmir. And it is equally distressing that they remain stuck in a conservative groove while discussing nuclear and conventional military confidence-building measures (CBMs) which will genuinely reduce the threat of a conflict in this volatile and now-nuclearised region. While the hitch on the (…)

Rediff on the Net interview with Abu Abraham the political cartoonist and journalist in 1997

Text of Lecture delivered by Prof Amartya Sen at Trinity College, Cambridge in Feb 1993

We have heard of chemical warfare, the kind witnessed in the U.S. defoliation campaign in Vietnam. Of biological warfare, which the U.S. Government waged by donating smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans long before the advent of anthrax terrorism. Not, however, of population warfare. It has been left to the fascists of India to discover this new dimension to unconventional warfare. And they see in it the cunning, conspiratorial strategy of their main enemy - the country’s religious minorities. It has taken only a single mis-statement of a census official to revive this pet theme of "Hindu nationalists" (a misleading, self-conferred title).