South Asia Citizens Web

In the context of the prolonged and horrific violence in Gujarat, there have been numerous calls for the VHP and Bajrang Dal to be banned. For some people, evidently, the well-documented role of these organisations in planning, inciting and perpetrating systematic attacks on Muslims - destroying their livelihoods, driving them out of their homes, raping hundreds of women and girls, and murdering thousands of men, women, children and babies - seems an obvious reason for outlawing them. (…)

Northeast In Deep Crisis
In the Northeast, they tell you, usually bluntly: “You Indians have the same attitude to us as the West has to the Third World. Normally, you ignore us completely. Our existence figures as a blip on your radar only when there is a disaster or calamity: massacres, serious ethnic clashes, floods, something bad. Otherwise, we are dead for you…” I first heard these words in Nagaland and Mizoram more than 20 years ago. They greeted me again on my visit to the Northeast (…)

Chandrababu Naidu’s defeat is the kind of event that lends itself so well to
analysis by hindsight that the effort would be too tiresome. In any case,
analysts attached to the Left parties have done that as ably as hindsight
alone permits, and there is no need to add to their wisdom (by which it is
not intended that they are altogether wrong). In fact, Naidu (or ‘Babu’ as
he is known to his admirers in the State) is a classic instance of a
phenomenon that the West is probably already very familiar with, but we are only just waking up to: a pervasive media creates a celebrity out of almost nothing, and then calls in experts to explain why its creation turned out to be nothing.

There is an increasing number of "missing girls" in villages in north India, their deaths unreported, killed often by male relatives or by members of her caste; their crime, like Geeta’s, being their relationship with a man from a lower caste. Ironically, such violence is described as honour violence or killings. In this view of "honour", the caste honour is vested in the chastity of a woman. If she transgresses caste-dictated norms in the expression of her sexuality she shames the entire community. There are no official statistics on the number of cases of violence against young people who choose their own partners in opposition to the wishes of their families/caste or religious community. But information gathered by the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) shows a definite increase in states like Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh.

Victor G. Kiernan, historian and translator of Iqbal and Faiz turned ninety recently. MUSHIRUL HASAN reviews a commemorative collection of his essays.