South Asia Citizens Web

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).

The Sangh Parivar’s tirades against textbook reform reek of obscurantist communalism and its glorification of Savarkar legitimises his pioneering of the Two-Nation theory and poisonous Hindutva. History-writing cannot become a handmaiden to such sectarian agendas; its independence and dignity must be restored.